Question 150 Ping and don’t know how to solve

[erok24]

So basically I have this weird thing with my pc where I’ll play video games like rainbow six siege and fortnite and have a nice 60-80 ping for multiple games then randomly have 150 CONSISTENT ping for an amount of games? I have literally tried everything. My internet is really good. My pc is really good. I use Ethernet. Also to note that my friend is always 60-80 ping (we live in alaska) and never spikes up to consistent 150 ping in r6 games like I do. It’s a really big issue because it lasts the entire game and I don’t know what to do at this point. If anyone has any unique idea what would solve this, plz lmk.

 

[bill001g]

The first thing you have to do is actually test the latency using actual tools rather than games. Games are affected by too many things and they tend to blame network even when it is some bug in the game.

What you need to do is use the actual ping command to test. I would start by running a constant ping to some common ip like 8.8.8.8. This should have fairly low ping times but I am unsure what you get in alaska especially if you are not in one of the larger cities. Key though is this is a large google DNS server that should be fairly close to you. These servers have massive ability to process data so the server itself will not cause latency spikes.

Key here is let this run in the background while you play the games. You want to see if there is a corresponding increase in this ping when they game claims there is more latency.

In either case latency is hard to fix, the ISP barely guarantee the bandwidth with their "up to" garbage. If you see issues to the 8.8.8.8 address your primary things to look for would be if you are somehow overloading the bandwidth you pay for. If it shows nothing you start to be suspect of the game. You would have to see what is different in the games that have normal latency and others, maybe the servers are in different locations.

 

[erok24]

This is what i got. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XyebU8U5y9kbQ8hbvO52CI5q02WUSQFIsOlIiGl3pTg/edit?usp=sharing
What do I do now that I've identified it? How do I solve it now?

 

[bill001g]

You did not set that link up properly to share it wants a userid/password. There likely is a locked post on the forum that shows how to post images, I don't know off hand.

You can also describe what you found.

Did you see the ping spike to 8.8.8.8 or just to the game servers.

The next step would be to run tracert to one of those addresses and then try to determine which hop the problem starts in. You can also try pingplotter but it is easy to misinterpret the results when you don't understand how the testing is done.

In general unless the delay is in the hop between your house and the ISP it will be hard to get this fixed. Most delays are caused by how the network was designed and how things like fiber paths run. For example there are very remote places in alaska that still only have satellite internet and likely never will have fiber. You can't really fix the problem of the time it takes for a radio signal to go all the way to orbit and back.

Still your first thing is to try to find the point it happens. Maybe you get lucky and it turns out you have some software issue on your pc or there are file downloads going on you do not know about. There are possible solutions for some games using special forms of vpn but it does not pay to chase a solution before you know what the problem really is.

 

[erok24]

Sorry, but basically I sent a google doc with the images showing that when I lagged the 8.8.8.8 pinger showed constant 130-150 ms and 112 TTL, when I wasn’t lagging in game it would be 40-60 ms.

 

[bill001g]

If you get random spikes to 8.8.8.8 but it is ok most the time then it is caused by load someplace. You could try to find the hop with things like tracert or maybe pathping.

You can nothing about traffic from other people so if there is some bottleneck in the ISP network that will be hard to fix.

What you need to hope is there is some traffic in your house exceeding your bandwidth. If you have a very large internet connection this tends to not be very likely. Many times though you can overload a small internet connection because some machine is say backing up a file to the cloud. This is common for people that say only have 5mbps upload rate. It could also be a process running in the background on your machine.

Your router might show utilization and if you are very lucky which machine is using how much but many do not. Now if the ping stays increased for long periods of time you might be able to disconnect machines one at a time to make it go away. If it is more random you are best off starting with just the game machine connected and slowly add other devices.

If it still happens with just the game machine hooked up and you are sure nothing else is running in the background then you can try to talk to the ISP. The first level techs likely have no training on how to troubleshoot latency. They pretty much only fix problems related to packet loss. Although less common it used to be a small ISP was overloading their connection to a larger ISP and could not afford to upgrade it. That they will never admit or fix.

 

[erok24]

I think I fixed it. It hasn’t had any issues after I finally tried something. Everything connected to our network was connected to our 2.5 g network and I made everything connected to 5g like our mobile phones and tv. I don’t know how this fixed it. But it worked so far.