High ping with good bandwidth up/down. help please.

[Codyrudenski]

Okay so I have 15mbps down 1mbps up internet, and after checking the bandwidth everything that people that i live with use.... we deffenitely do not use all the bandwidh... I ran a speed test while everyone was doing stuff to make sure and it still came up 6 mpbs down .6mbps up...

Why is it that although hardwired, I get a high ping when trying to play anything, although there is still bandwidth? This has been going on for a while and a lot of people that i know have this problem. I would love to be able to fix it considering I pay for the 15 megs so i can game while everyone else does their thing.



PS... running league and pandora only uses 1.5-6 megs. Which is where I see the most lag. turning off pandora doesnt help.

 

[houldendub]

How many people do you live with? What do they do while using their computers/devices? If, for instance, they're streaming a Youtube video, their computer is going to be constantly contacting the Youtube servers for packets of video data.

What is the lag like when nobody is using their computers? This is the best surefire way to find out if what they are dong is affecting your performance.

 

[Codyrudenski]

i live with 3 other people. and they do all sorts of shit from netflix to youtube to gaming. but none of that uses incredible amounts of bandwidth. I could have a steady 350+ ping in LoL(usually 90), but run a speed test and still have 8 megs down and .9 megs upload bandwidth to play with.... and the ping for the speed test is never bad. its only ever the ping in my games. league, cs:go, Gmod, planetside 2, any of them. It would make sense to me if I didnt have any bandwidth left when I was getting the lag, but there is still plenty showing up. And I did the math, if EVERYONE in the house was watching netflix at the same time, only 3 mbps would be getting used. youtube, and any other program i could think of that I could find the bandwidth for, still leaves me with all sorts of room to play with. but my ping is still high.,


(im hardwired in slot 1, and there is an xbox 360 that never gets used plugged into slot 4) \

 

[houldendub]

That's not exactly how it works I'm afraid. If everyone is watching Netflix, gaming, doing all sorts of things, then they'll all be sending and receiving "packets" (your ping is how long it takes to get these packets). Someone watching a video, for instance, will be receiving absolutely tons and tons of packets through, especially if they're watching something in HD.

Saying that, is it just your computer that gets lag? Does matey boy who also plays games get lag in his games during a time when you'd be getting lag? Knowing this would determine whether it's a local issue to your PC or simply because the network is clogged up.

 

[Kewlx25]

Sounds like you may have an issue of "buffer bloat". Bandwidth and latency are two completely separate things.

What is probably happening is your up-stream is saturated, causing packets to back-up in the router and modem buffer, which creates latency. If you router has an option for QoS, set your up-stream speed to about 90% of what you actually get.

This should keep the buffers from getting full by rate limiting the upload to slightly less than what you actually have. With empty buffers, their should be no latency caused by buffer bloat. There could still be other issues, but this is a very common one.

 

[Rand35]

Ping time is a function of distance, not bandwith. The further the packet travels the higher the ping time.

TCP does throttle itself (slow down) with packet discards, so ping rate can climb with a lack of bandwidth, but more bandwidth doesn't make it decline. Lets say you and your room mate live in Buffalo,NY and each have dedicated connections to the internet, no one else uses them - your connection is from Time Warner Cable, your room mates connection is from the LEC (Frontier, I believe). Frontier and Time Warner don't have any peering agreements (the don't connect their networks to improve service between their customers), so the closest MAE point is New Jersy. Even though you can sit in the same room with each other and share a bowl of chips, packets from your gaming machines will have to travel to NJ and back to talk to each other - so you will always see ping times of 35 ms or more ...load is irrelevent.

 

[Kewlx25]

Ping time is a function of distance, not bandwith. The further the packet travels the higher the ping time.

TCP does throttle itself (slow down) with packet discards, so ping rate can climb with a lack of bandwidth, but more bandwidth doesn't make it decline. Lets say you and your room mate live in Buffalo,NY and each have dedicated connections to the internet, no one else uses them - your connection is from Time Warner Cable, your room mates connection is from the LEC (Frontier, I believe). Frontier and Time Warner don't have any peering agreements (the don't connect their networks to improve service between their customers), so the closest MAE point is New Jersy. Even though you can sit in the same room with each other and share a bowl of chips, packets from your gaming machines will have to travel to NJ and back to talk to each other - so you will always see ping times of 35 ms or more ...load is irrelevent.

In theory and best practices what you're saying is correct, but buffer bloat on consumer grade end-points is causing latency issues during congestion. Buffers are supposed to be sized to only hold around 0.001sec-0.01sec worth of data. Many end user DSL and cable modems have upwards of 1sec-2sec of buffer. Because TCP backs-off on packet-loss, these buffers artificially cause TCP to not back-off in a timely fashion. And even when TCP backs-off finally, it may not be enough to fully flush the buffers, still causing lag.