[SOLVED] How come my ping in games and voice calls spike up so high even though I get good ping in speed test?

Jun 25, 2020
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So I've recently been having bad internet and I upgraded to the highest internet plan that my ISP offers, but for some reason it seems to have made my experience worse. Every device is doing great in terms of internet, but only my gaming computer is having issues as in ping spikes. I go from 10-30ms to 2000+ms in discord and 80ms to 2000+ in league. I even tried a new Ethernet and contacted my ISP which said that the internet is fine. When I run a speed test though, I get really good ms so I'm wondering why it spikes still.



If specs might have anything to do with it they are:



-Intel Core I7-9700K 8-core 3.6 GHZ- CPU



-Asus Prime Z390-A LGA 1151- Motherboard



-CROSAIR Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR$ 3000mhz-RAM



- CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Lite ML240L- CPU Cooling



- EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SC Ultra GAMING 6GB GDDR6- GPU



-Intel 660p Seriews M.2 2280 1TB- Storage



- HP EX900 M.2 250 GB- Storage



- EVGA 650 GQ-0650-V1 80+ GOLD 650W Modular-PSU
 
Solution
It gets really hard when you do not see the spike using actual ping commands. This means the game and/or discord is telling some kind of lie. Most games do not actually use ping commands they measure the latency of the actual data. You can see similar numbers for open tcp sessions in the network tab of the resource monitor.

These number are many times better BUT they are affected by the application itself. If the client or the server has issues it will show high latency/ping but it is not caused by the network. A very common one you see on games is in video routines. The game gets busy processing the data and when it finally gets around to checking the latency it blames the time it was doing video on the network.

Not...
Speedtest only measure the latency at the start mostly to find the closest server. High ping time mostly is a measure of distance and distance impacts the maximum transfer rate.

Random ping times are caused by some device in the path getting some kind of overload condition where it must hold data in a queue.

First run a constant ping to both your router IP and to a common IP like 8.8.8.8 in back ground windows. You can use the game server IP if you know it and it will respond to ping.

This first test is to see if actual ping commands see the same issue as the game. Many times games are not actually using ping and claim there are network problems when it is some problem with the game client or the server.

If you see ping spike to your router it indicates a issue with the pc, make very sure you are not running on wifi. If the ping to your router is ok and the ping to the remote ip has large spikes then it harder. Your next step is to run tracert to the end ip and then run constant ping to each hop trying to find the one causing the issue. Realistically if it is not in hop2 which is your connection to your ISP you are not going to get it fixed. It could be a issue between the game company ISP and your ISP. Hop2 represent the connection to your house and your ISP may see something if you call them.
 
Jun 25, 2020
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So there wasn't any problem with constant ping to my router's IP and to Hop2, what can that indicate? I did see some spikes in the trace route with other pings but I do not know if that would necessarily signify anything. I didn't even find any massive ping spikes in the one I was having the worst connection on.
 
It gets really hard when you do not see the spike using actual ping commands. This means the game and/or discord is telling some kind of lie. Most games do not actually use ping commands they measure the latency of the actual data. You can see similar numbers for open tcp sessions in the network tab of the resource monitor.

These number are many times better BUT they are affected by the application itself. If the client or the server has issues it will show high latency/ping but it is not caused by the network. A very common one you see on games is in video routines. The game gets busy processing the data and when it finally gets around to checking the latency it blames the time it was doing video on the network.

Not sure you need to run ping in the back ground while the game runs and maybe you get lucky and see something. Finding some crazy video setting in a game to fix something like this is very hit and miss.
 
Solution
Jun 25, 2020
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It's especially weird since right now I am experiencing bad ping and I ran a constant ping on the discord IP and it was really high and then I ran a trace route on the same discord IP and it showed that everything was stable. Even while the discord connection showed red bars