Certain ISP (Interenet Service Provider) companies tend to mess with your internet connection to cut on cost. Heavy users that download hundreds of gigabytes per month, sometimes find out that suddenly their services (be it legitimate or P2P) become very slow or randomly drop the connection - a measure taken by the ISP to slow or completely stop traffic.
Unfortunately, those measures sometimes affect other things, like browsing, online gaming and in our case, Runescape.
Applicability:
This method is used to deal with cases where your character isn't moving for a few seconds, then when unfrozen, all other players and NPCs quickly move all over the place, and repeat.
It's most relevant if your connection is indeed being tempered by your ISP, but you can try it out to see if it helps anyway. It's worth the hassle if you must play on a certain world (DG, GWD trip).
Requirements:
* TCPView, available from Microsoft's website.
* Preferably the game client, although you can also spot your browser using the game ports and kill the connections.
Method:
The purpose is to force the game to connect through port 443 instead of the default ports, 43594 and 43595. Port 443 is the port used for SSL connections - the thing you're connected through when shopping online, or logging in to the RS website. Your ISP won't be able to decypher stuff sent through SSL, so usually they simply won't be blocking it in the first place.
Follow these steps to begin:
1. Unzip and fire up Tcpview.exe.
2. Connect to the laggy world.
3. If you're using the RS client, search for JagexLauncher.exe in TCPView and examine the Remote Port column. If it's either 43594 or 43595, right click the process and choose Close Connection. The game will attempt to re-establish a connection, but will probably kick you back to the login screen. Login back to the laggy world and examine the port again. If it's still 43594/5, repeat the procedure (shouldn't take more than twice) until the port changes to 443 or 'https'.
4. See if it still lags. If not, well, don't thank me, thank Superman. If you still lag, then your ISP probably still sucks, but at least they're not throttling your connection.
Note: If you play through your browser, look for ports 43594 or 43595 under the process name (chrome.exe for example). If you're logged in to a world, and you can't find it or only see ports 'http', 'https' or 443, then you're on standard lag and there's not much to be done.