A couple of years ago I set up an ioquake3 based dedicated server to play with friends. Now that we’re under lockdown, we’re playing over the WAN instead of the LAN. What I’d like to do is configure the server and client for the fastest possible ping times, but I’m seeing confusing results.
When on the LAN and when we specify a IP address for the server, we see ping times of 3 or 4. When on the WAN, or on the LAN and using a DNS entry instead of a raw IP, we see much higher ping times (like 40 milliseconds).
This last case, is odd. Clearly we should never see an order of magnitude ping time increase just by using a domain name. The server must be limiting bandwidth.
I’ve looked at the code and have seen where the server does LAN client detection, and will optionally not limit the connection if the sv_lanForceRate option is enabled. That setting and tweaking my local options like the following has helped get me down to 20 milliseconds over the WAN (or on the LAN using a domain name):
seta sv_lanForceRate “0”
seta cl_lanForcePackets “0”
But I’m pretty sure I can do much better than 20. I’ve got a gigabit bidirectional connection. The office is on a 500 Mbps bidirectional connection with the same ISP in the same town.
For example, I just jumped on someone’s public server and was getting a ping of 7. Clearly they know something that I don’t know 
Anyone have suggestions for changing our server or client settings to allow high bandwidth, non-throttled connections? I know that I can probably hack the code and rebuild the server, but I’d prefer to just make config changes if possible.
Note that I saw this post from someone asking a similar question but no one answered:
Thanks in advance.