Windows Firewall or Router Port Forwarding?

[Val155]

Hi all you pros,

Quick question. My kids play World of Warcraft and have been experiencing a lot of latency lately. I wanted to setup port fowarding to see if it would assist in their connection to the game's servers.

I obtained the three ports for the World of Warcraft game. I went into my router (Sagemcom F@st5260) and went to the Port Forwarding tab. I added a rule for all three ports for the game. I typed "World of Warcraft Port 1" for the "Service Name". For the "External Host" field I left it blank. For the "Internal Host" field I listed their computer's IP Address. For the "External Port" and "Internal Port" I listed the same port. For example, the first port was 1234, so I listed it in both the External and Internal fields. I repeated this process for the last two ports for the game.

I then went to the Windows 10 Defender Firewall and added the three port rules to that application as well.

Did I do this correctly? Will this help reduce latency? Do I need to port forward in both the Router and in the Windows 10 Defender Firewall?

Also, should I "reserve" the PC's IP address for the port forward in the Router's settings?

I understand not to list the computer in the "DMZ" tab of the router as that would make the entire PC available to anyone to inflitrate. So I only placed their PS4 in that DMZ list.

Any guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[don256us]

Have you tested your internet speed? While the network is fairly quiet, go to speedtest dot net and see what kind of speed up and down and perhaps more to what you have been looking at, ping time. If your ISP pings are in the upper double digits or triple digits, your work will be for naught.

It is possible that you have a ton of internal traffic competing for external bandwidth. At this point you can't rule out a virus on your machine(s).

To me the telling part of your post is "lately". When then did start to be a problem? Was there a time when you knew that it was faster? Did the kids turn up a setting within the game that takes more bandwidth. Did you get a new Netflix account and now your watching every show they got? What changed about the time that they started seeing the problem?

 

[BigZ1981]

PS4 on DMZ? No way. I don't see any reason why a PS4 needs to be on DMZ. Mine isn't & it works fine. So let's talk latency. Like Don said, latency is based on numerous factors. Also keep in mind that includes the originating PC, so if it's slowing down from malware or any background programs/services that are memory-heavy, that will make a difference as well. Sure, port forwarding can help with latency as that makes the process easier on the router side of things, but by that same token, all traffic still has to be checked by the router, so it won't drop the latency by much. Heavy network activity in the home will definitely have an impact on that as well. There should be logs or monitoring available on your router's firmware that can tell you what your traffic looks like for each device connected to the network.