Question Excessive latency, Upload speed question (PingPlotter Results)

[demion06]

Hi everyone,
I am trying to expand my knowledge to resolve my issues with my ISP and latency problems we've been having for months. After numerous tech visits, I finally got escalated to some lead tech to further help troubleshoot. I leave PingPlotter running almost constantly so I can see when there are issues coming up.

https://imgur.com/TkLRxJW

First picture is what I normally experience... I see it starts at the first node outside my local network and more then likely my ISP's problem. Needless to say, its been a pain.

But my question is around uploading... I've noticed if I try running a speed test... when its on the upload portion, even though its never able to hit my max upload speed 35Mb/s (usually anywhere between 15-28Mb/s), I noticed extremely high spikes in latency (See below..). I do have QoS enabled on my router as well.

https://imgur.com/ar20vDq

My question is... is that normal when trying to max out upload bandwidth or could this be an indication of my regular use problems?

Thanks for the help in advance!

 

[bill001g]

Tools like this really should require training.

You may have a actual problem but the tool is not really showing it.

So first many routers have restrictions on how much ping type traffic they will respond to. This is to prevent denial of service attacks with a ping command. What can happen is if a router is too busy passing actual traffic or you hit some limit it might delay responding or not respond at all.

The 100 packet loss you see in the second set of tests can not be valid because you would never see any device past that one.

What a real issue looks like what you see say in the AVG column in the first example. You see 66ms and every node past it including and most important the final node sees at least that or more. This means something in hop 2 is adding 66ms.

That is rather high for many internet connections. You generally see less than 10ms for hop 2 but it depends on the technology if it is say mobile broadband it is not unusual to even see 100ms. It would also be normal if you had a lot of traffic on the link.

I am unsure what your real issue is.

If you attempt to max the connection out you will always see the latency increase. What most ISP do is when you hit the limit they will buffer some small amount of traffic rather than discarding it. This is so small burst of traffic do not cause loss when your average rate over say 1second is still under the limit. When they place the traffic in buffers it causes delay. This is a problem called bufferbloat which pretty much is only a bad things for some game. Game unlike every other application would rather have the data discarded than delayed.

Note I would not use any form of QoS on your router unless you have some issue where you have traffic exceeding your bandwidth. The QoS software puts a huge load on the router CPU because it can not longer use the hardware NAT function.
If you have a large connection say over 300mbps it can cap the speed.

In general latency issue you are not going to get fixed. The ISP does not promise any latency unless you buy some very fancy service. Latency is also many times a distance thing being limited by the speed of light. You can not fix high ping time say between the USA and India.

 

[demion06]

Thanks for the reply @bill001g

Generally I ignore the packet loss in that tool unless its showing up on the last step (hop 9 in the first picture). Which is happening occasionally on my internet

https://imgur.com/Hvoza8L

I use pingplotter more to have a better visualization of latency (the bottom graph) which is a bit easier to track spikes then looking at cmd pings

https://imgur.com/qThrxAU

Our ISP is cable, not mobile. Actually the box outside our house has a fiber line coming to it but is exiting coaxial to us. Our plan is 1gig down, 35up. I have a custom QoS on my router set to those speeds (set to gaming/video voice as top 1&2 priority). I only enabled it as an attempt to solve the upload speed problems. It did help to improve my overall bufferbloat rating initially but its back to being in the gutter. Definitely a time of day thing and oddly enough not nearly as bad on the weekend.

https://imgur.com/gLoIGRm

I should preface by saying all these screenshots were taken with nearly no one else using the internet in my household.

But like you said, definitely a problem with Gaming, you hit the nail on the head there. And given my bufferbloat rating tanks during these periods of "high latency" that must be the problem.

Live stream/live games are borderline unusable/unplayable. Online gaming flashes D/C or consistent rubberbanding every couple seconds regardless of the game. I can say for certainty that I am using the most local DC's for gaming servers. With the first screenshot in my initial post, that was happening while attempting to game. In game latency graphs similarly go from steady sub 30ms to spikes every 2-3seconds into the 200-400s while my brother 5 miles away in the same game, same time had 0 issues (different ISP)

I get that our ISP probably does not have any contractual obligations to ensure lower latency but surely there must be something ISPs they can do? Unfortunately where I am, mine are the only "high speed" provider in our area so switching to another service that has a more stable latency doesn't seem to be in our cards.

 

[bill001g]

Well your current traces say most the problems are in the last few hops all in google network. But I suspect this is just bad testing data.

What still is very strange is how high your average time to your ISP router is in hop 2. The minimum is 10ms which is what you should see most the time. These are very hard to find because it is not some simple wire problem. Some equipment is holding the data in a memory buffer. There are really only 3 your router or maybe the modem and then the ISP equipment.

Can you plug your pc directly into the modem and bypass the router or is a modem/router combo unit.
If you can't bypass the router maybe try a factory reset on the router and configure only the admin and wifi passwords.
By default the router should only be running NAT and because modern routers do NAT in hardware outside the CPU they can generally pass 1gbit of traffic easily with no delays.