Zwift works perfectly on Free rides. I’ve been having a problem with everyone on my screen disappearing ONLY on group rides. A disconnect banner would pop up, however, I would still see the group ride leader chatting away. Obviously, my connection to Zwift servers is still active, but everyone else has disappeared. Pretty frustrating when trying to draft on group rides.
I use a Wahoo Kickr Core with Cog connected via bluetooth to a wireless laptop. I am usually watching youtube on a separate mobile device as well during my training sessions, and youtube never disconnects. I don’t think it is a network issue on my end, but maybe some sort of configuration issue? Not a bandwidth as well because I would still disconnect when youtube isn’t active.
Help me brainstorm, any advise is appreciated. Thanks
You could upload a log file to zwiftalizer.com and see what it says is going on. It might help narrow it down a bit.
YouTube working is not a good assessment of whether the network is good, since it buffers traffic to avoid playback interruptions. Like many games Zwift uses UDP to transmit some of the data, which is a connectionless protocol that will not retry if a packet is dropped, and the sender doesn’t necessarily know if the packet was received or not. It uses several different network ports for different types of communication.
The other thing that is often different about group rides is there are more riders visible near you, which means more traffic and more use of the CPU, so you could check if you have a super busy CPU core on the machine. Zwift doesn’t make much use of multiple CPU cores, so you would be looking for one that is at 100% utilization, not overall utilization of all cores.
You could also try shutting down Zwift on the laptop, run it on something else and see if you can replicate the problem. Just make double extra sure you don’t leave it running on two devices on the same time. If you test it on a mobile device, I would delete the app when you’re done testing.
Welcome to the Zwift forums! Jose from Zwift Support here.
I checked your logs, and it seems you might have lost connection to our servers during your rides yesterday and on June 17th. This would explain what you’re seeing.
Please, check our article on common connection issues and troubleshooting steps.
If that doesn’t help, a high ping rate could be the cause. Please run a speed test following the guide here.
As a last step try a different internet connection (like a phone hotspot) for a quick ride. If it works better, the issue is likely with your ISP’s connection route to our servers, and you might need to contact them.
If the problem continues, feel free to reply here or contact us directly. We’re happy to help!