Gaming question

Im playing alot of americas army at the moment and i was just wondering if a firewall has anything to do with my ping. Im using that zonealarm free firewall but just had an inkling that it might slow my connection down as my mate (when we lan) has a higher net speed off the same connection and he doesnt have any firewall at all.

also does anyone else play americas army? Its great my name on it is killa_chaos187. cheers guys

breakerswitch said:

Im playing alot of americas army at the moment and i was just wondering if a firewall has anything to do with my ping. Im using that zonealarm free firewall but just had an inkling that it might slow my connection down as my mate (when we lan) has a higher net speed off the same connection and he doesnt have any firewall at all.

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Well technically, a firewall, whether its a hardware firewall or a software firewall will slow down your pings, as each packet as it passes through the firewall, will need to be inspected. However, it shouldnt add too much to your latency, maybe a few milliseconds. The firewall may impact you in a different way if your PCs CPU cannot handle running the game, the firewall, the OS and other applications at the same time. It may give priority to other processes so your ping maybe buffered and thefore delayed. This would be the same if you were running out of memory (RAM).

I hope that helps. Maybe try running it without your firewall, very briefly, to see if your pings improve. If you do narrow it down to your firewall, then maybe you should consider a hardware firewall.

Cheers
Rick

wow cheers for that. Ive got a new dual2 processor but only a gig of ram so it looks like i might have to upgrade. thanks for the info mate.

I would think a gig of ram would be sufficient. Just try briefly without the firewall running and see if that fixes your problem. It may not be your problem and you maybe upgrading for no reason.

Cheers
Rick