Connection timed out or vrchat stopped responding error (too often)
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Jaden Safar
Some of you may have recived this error "[Disconnected] VRChat is not responding." or "[Disconnected] Your connection has timed out." every few minutes or so. The experience you will have is one way trafic from VRChat to you but you stop sending to VRChat. Example: You are talking to a freind, And they ask you a question. You answer their question and they say "hello? you still there?" with in a few seconds of them saying that you get the error. The most likely reason for this is due to a thing called route changes. Route changes is when your ISP changes ISPs internally giving you a new/better route online. These are normal and a often occurrence. But for those who have wireless internet your route may change constantly (Starlink and Verizon are two well known companies who do this) No matter if you follow VRChats troubleshooting steps you will run into the same issue even with Cloudflare warp. A theory I had is that VRChat servers don't accept a different IP in the route causing the client to "retry" but the mapping back to your IP does not change (They can send through different routes and not care because they wont see that packet) In one instance, I received a "[Can't Travel] You are not allowed to travel to that location. (Code: 403) [Okay]", a "[Disconnected] VRChat is not responding. [Okay]" error, and an ISP induced route change at the same moment. Sometimes I would hear multiple ping sounds when disconnecting and it kind of hurts the ears. (>o<) If VRChat would like to have all the little details that I gathered please message me and I will send graphs and data of what's gathered. If anyone has any questions or ideas please list them below.
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dimen363
MAJOR UPDATE:
After investigating and trying different things to mitigate the issue I've successfully stopped the random timeouts occurring during VRChat sessions.
The issue seems to be related to ISP's switching to CGNAT instead of using Real Dynamic IP address allocation. This is what happened to me, and my ISP was beginning to assign IP addresses from 10.0.0.0/8 range to me.
How did I came up with the fix?
At certain point when going on with my stuff I set up a Plex server at home, but it complained that It wasn't available through the internet (example picture provided), so for some time it had to rely on somewhat bandwidth limited Plex relay servers for streaming media via internet.
Sometime after that I learned that my ISP provides a service where for a small monthly fee (0.84€) I could get a Real Dynamic IPv4 WAN address allocation back, so I subscribed and now Plex is running properly over the internet.
Afterwards I tried seeing how VRChat would work after these changes. And surprisingly there were no random disconnects happening anymore since then (around 2 months now at the time of writing).
Leaving all this info here in case anyone finds it valuable.
Jaden Safar
dimen363 This still happens to users who route change through their ISP. I notice the issues mostly occur when TTL change or when the path changes. VRChat is not the only one affected by this issue. There are ways to combat this on their end since a lot of ISPs e.g. starlink or BAM, Use this redundant method. I was able to recreate the issue at one of my data centers that have internal switches that can change on the spot. My internal routes can be 3-5 layers. If one switch goes off I go through the back up line which adds +1 to the internal hops. Apparently it doesn't matter where the TTL changes it just matters if it changes. So users who are using wireless ISPs or older ISPs will experience this more. I'm sure there's still something VRChat or Photon can do to combat this issue somehow. Discord made a patch recently for this exact issue by using some sort of buffer method.
TL;DR It's mainly a ISP issue
dimen363
Jaden Safar Hi
Thanks for such a detailed feedback on your part.
Now I'm just hoping that info will get to VRC team and will get fixed eventually, as some of my friends have also started to complain of regular timeouts I've described earlier.
Jaden Safar
dimen363My team at Didjital and VRChat already had a detailed email about it. They are aware of the issue but isn't easy to solve directly. I'm sure at some point in time the servers will need to get this resolved as more and more people are coming online from remote places.
dimen363
Have been having the same issue for the last two weeks or so - every 10 minutes or so the game stops me with the timeout error and then rejoins the instance. VRChat output logs having the following at the time of the incident:
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Error - Connection lost. OnStatusChanged to TimeoutDisconnect. Client state was: Joined. SCS v0 UDP SocketErrorCode: 0 AppOutOfFocus WinSock
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] OnLeftRoom
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] Cleaning up held messages
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] OnPlayerLeft Strytec
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] Removed player Strytec
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] OnPlayerLeft dimen363
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] Removed player dimen363
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] OnDisconnected: ClientTimeout
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Error - [Behaviour] {{ NameServerAddress: 'ns.photonengine.io:5058', MasterServerAddress: '082139283A01D67135EA742680FFD6D8.exitgames.com:5055', GameServerAddress: '216.120.180.181:5056', Code: 'ClientTimeout', State: 'Disconnected', Time: '998743.99' }}
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Log - [Behaviour] Disconnected: ClientTimeout with Reason:
2024.04.30 22:40:22 Error - [Behaviour] Timeout: Your connection to VRChat timed out. Verify connection and try again.
dimen363
UPDATE:
After carefully investigating and observing my local network and PC I managed to fix the issue.
The key thing I noticed - different problems with network connection arose only on the computer on my local network as soon as I am starting using Steam Link with my Quest 2 (both Quest 2 and my PC are connected to the same network). Specifically - when I turn on Steam Link and connect to my pc - discord started reporting networking problems and I couldn't load into it until I restarted it, which lead me to believe the problem is localized to the PC itself.
After digging further I found out that other people on the internet had certain issues with my motherboard ethernet controller (Realtek RTL8125B(G)) regarding its power saving feature (example - https://forum.htc.com/topic/12494-tip-disable-power-saving-mode-in-your-ethernet-adapter-settings/ )
Sure enough - when going to the manufacturer driver page for my ethernet controller ( https://www.realtek.com/Download/List?cate_id=584 ) I could see two different Ethernet Controller driver variants for the OS I am using (screenshot provided).
So I uninstalled the drivers that were provided by the motherboard manufacturer, downloaded the ones from Realtek that say "not support power saving", and installed them. Rebooted computer, went to VRChat - no more networking timeouts and/or other issues observed.
My conclusion - looks like certain amount of networking issues users are experiencing could be caused by certain Ethernet Controller power saving features in Windows and/or the Ethernet Controller Driver itself which results in dropped connections in certain scenarios, most likely due to increased network load due to VR if you are using Steam Link, possibly also Air Link, Virtual Desktop.
Hopefully this post helped those who have the issue.
dimen363
Another update:
The above solution hasn't completely fixed the issue and the timeouts are still happening, though less often. The issue seems to manifest itself more often during evenings (currently my time zone is UTC+03:00).
P.S.
The internet provider I am using is LMT via a 5G modem-router (LMT Branded Mikrotik Chateau 5G). The computer is connected to it via wired ethernet. Note that the timeout issues started happening towards the middle-end of the last month (April 2024). No changes to my network setup have occurred during that timeframe. The only physical thing that changed was a new computer, but that happened at the end of March, and no ussies have been observed during that period until the aforementioned time.
Jasper Raine
I have this issue way too often (quite literally every day) but I'm on a wired connection. Rebooting the router/modem doesn't do anything, reinstalling vrchat does nothing, restarting my computer does nothing. I'm just having to wait until this issue is fixed
Jasper Raine
Figured out a possible cause out of many possible causes. Really demanding/unoptimized worlds tend to disconnect me much more often than others do.
Jaden Safar
Update on my end, The route changes stopped in my ISP now that they have fiber internet so it's confirmed route changes are the cause. The issue is resolved for me but still not for others.
Takumi Nishijo
I tried restarting my router and it fixed this problem. Thank you.
____
On January 31st, it starts happening suddenly.
Did VRChat change something?
Environment: Oculus Quest 1
Build: 1275
Jaden Safar
Takumi Nishijo: I would check to see if your network is changing routes. It's more common with wireless ISPs
Takumi Nishijo
Jaden Safar: My ISP is using optical fibers. The speed is 2Gbps at best. The only wireless part is between my WiFi AP and my Oculus. My VRChat on PC doesn't have any wireless connection but it has the same issue.
Build 1277 didn't fix my problem.
Related post (Japanese):
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Cynexialove 白兔
real
Scout - VRChat Head of Quality Assurance
tracked bug