EFnet IRC Network Forum

Im used to having months long continous connections to EFnet, but recently ive been having trouble finding a stable server, so I want to ask everyone what they find to be the most stable server for them, and maybe tell us your continous connection record

For me the most stable in the past have been:

irc.secsup.org
irc.he.net

Thanks

There are many factors which come into play when talking about the 'most stable server.' A server that could be perfectly stable to one user, could be horrible to another for many reasons, mainly routing. You could have excellent routing to irc.choopa.net, but have horrible routing to irc.secsup.org since they sit on different networks in different geographical regions around the US. You can also blame packet kiddies for your instability problems, since they have been DDoSing many EFNet servers recently.

windsok wrote:Im used to having months long continous connections to EFnet, but recently ive been having trouble finding a stable server, so I want to ask everyone what they find to be the most stable server for them, and maybe tell us your continous connection record

For me the most stable in the past have been:

irc.secsup.org
irc.he.net

Thanks

I would recommend tracerouting the servers you think might be close to you and find out which has the best routes ( lowest ms lag & fewest hops ).

But as corrupt said, stability depends on a lot of factors, like how much bandwith the server has, how often its attacked and how often the admins upgrades/cores their ircd

For me its Servercentral, no question about it... And I'm in canada.... For some reason I have better connections there then to .ca servers...

-tiz

tiz wrote:For me its Servercentral, no question about it... And I'm in canada.... For some reason I have better connections there then to .ca servers...

-tiz

Yes.. It also depends on yor ISP, and who they peer with.
If you are using a huge company that might be US based like aol, you may get preferntial treatment to US based peers.

Like everyone has said.. it just depends.

You're best bet is to find something that works well for you and stick with it.

There was a time when I could stick a canadian based client, on one particular EU server, and have it be more stable there then any US or CA server.. SOunds wierd, but it worked great.

It all just depends...

Like all things, of the laundry detergent dosent wash out right.. rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat... etc..

Or just switch laundry detergent..

tiz wrote:For me its Servercentral, no question about it... And I'm in canada.... For some reason I have better connections there then to .ca servers...

-tiz

SC uses some peer1.net, a canadian carrier.

-seiki

I tend not to let people know what I believe is the most stable server, due to everyone switching to it and causing high traffic and possible downtime.

and don`t whois me!

Servers that have the fewest hops, I find, have good response time, but that also means when they go down, for whatever it may be (peering issue, packet loss on my end, etc) I get disconnected instantly.

In the same light, when a server is a fair bit of hops away I find that although I may lag, if the server is getting DoS'd, etc, I have a better chance of staying connected due to the high latency. The excessive amount of hops seem to make the connection more forgiving of connection issues due to the time it takes to deliver packets in transit. Of course, as stated before, this depends on your ISP's peering and other typical factors.

Little_C wrote:Servers that have the fewest hops, I find, have good response time, but that also means when they go down, for whatever it may be (peering issue, packet loss on my end, etc) I get disconnected instantly.

In the same light, when a server is a fair bit of hops away I find that although I may lag, if the server is getting DoS'd, etc, I have a better chance of staying connected due to the high latency. The excessive amount of hops seem to make the connection more forgiving of connection issues due to the time it takes to deliver packets in transit. Of course, as stated before, this depends on your ISP's peering and other typical factors.

Number of hops (i think you talk about number for router hops in the traceroute) has NOTHING todo with it. Check the pings in the traceroute instead. As in our case with SUNET in Sweden we have alot of short hops. This because theres ALOT of router all over keeping redundancy in several rings going in each other.

So please learn som basic networking :-) It all about the ping and throughput, not about the number of hops. It might however be about how many different providers there are on the way, you can see that by the routers name.

some IRC clients have options that enable you to ping the server from the client itself to see what your ping reply is. i guess you can what server is best just from there.

Jepp wrote:some IRC clients have options that enable you to ping the server from the client itself to see what your ping reply is. i guess you can what server is best just from there.

It's not an IRC client feature, but some IRC clients make more use of it than others. This should work in all clients: /quote ping x [server]

I think we are forgetting something here that I think has alot to do with how long your client will stay online.
A couple of months ago I know irc.inet.tele.dk and irc.easynews.com had their max ping timeout limit set to around 1600 seconds. This means your client could practically be disconnected from the ircserver, but as long as your client has no activity and the ircserver doesnt time the connection out - it will just have a reconnect burst when your ISP or whatever has things sorted. And you wont appear as disconnected from the network. I've had clients on tele.dk where powercuts caused the switches/modems to reboot - but I didnt disconnect from the server.
Other ircservers has this limit set to around 480 seconds?

However, my personal experience with very stable EFnet servers are: irc.inet.tele.dk, irc.easynews.com, irc.efnet.pl, irc.choopa.net and irc.servercentral.net.

Traceroutes and/or latency in this case is overrated. My traceroutes to irc.inet.tele.dk or my other favourites for that matter are *horrible* compared to other IRC-servers where I have better routes/latency. I still get disconnected faster from these.

/sealie

Hi!

I'm in Atlantic Canada and I find these servers stable:
irc.avalonworks.ca
irc.limelight.us
irc.choopa.net
irc.banetele.no

In fact, I've been on limelight now for 4 days 20 hours 1 minute 16 seconds without any disconnects or major (complaints except for a few hubs splitting here and there but that's expected on a network of that capacity).

~smiles~

Limelight is by far one of the best. I get disconnected from the other servers usually after a 5 or 6 days.

...
19:09:15 -!- server : irc.limelight.us [Limelight Networks - Phoenix, AZ]
19:09:15 -!- idle : 35 days 14 hours 36 mins 39 secs [signon: Tue May 19:09:15 -!- End of WHOIS

That was a while back though.
The client connects from a server in Germany.