LagMeter
LagMeter is a program that Bigfoot Networks released recently that attempts to put a definition on what lag is, as well as displaying a graphic representation of the lag on your system.
Since the term “lag” has no formal definition, Bigfoot went ahead and did it themselves:
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Client Lag – Any time the FPS (frames-per-second) value of a graphical application is below 45 FPS, or, (when that measurement is inapplicable or unavailable) when CPU utilization of a client machine is 95% or greater on average for 100ms.
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Network Lag – Whenever the ‘PING’ result for a network connection is greater than 100ms, a Network Lag occurs for each 50ms above the 100ms. A result of less than 100ms means Network (PING) is not causing Lag. Packet Loss is also detected and adds to the Network Lag Figure.
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Server Lag – Any time the back-to-back reception of packets within a connection exceeds 100ms after subtracting the PING time, or response data from a connection as a result of sending data to the server takes longer than 100ms after subtracting PING times.
The LagMeter application is shown here, with three different colors to represent the three types of lag mentioned above. You can see that the graph shows current “lags” and lags that you might see “without a Killer” though I have no idea what it is doing to estimate that!
Pings in the game are being detected and graphed here as well.
Frame rates are measured by FRAPS, which you have to download seperately.
A summary of the “lags” statistics is provided here.
In the advanced menu you can tell the applicaiton what game you are going to play or you can manually set the UDP ports to monitor the ping and traffic on.