[SOLVED] I have had ping spikes and packet loss for a long time, and want to fix it.

[WizardVoice]

I often experience lag spikes spikes in games that last for a few seconds, and this occurs every few seconds, although can sometimes just not happen at all. I have a screen shot of pingplotter showing this.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/9532/IT4oxG.png

 

[failboat]

Many routers don't have much in terms of monitoring. You can try and narrow down the issue by eliminating factors. Only have your pc online and wired, no wifi connections, and you can use resource monitor to watch if networks spiking to max out your bandwidth. You could probably find some better software with more details. At your router the package iftop is very good for checking current bandwidth and finding the local machine. You can also test your LAN with iperf3. If you have a weak wifi/powerline/anything thats not wired connection you can see packet loss.

It's normal for ping to spike when your up or down is congested. Those consistent spikes could be something like streaming media. It does incremental small downloads unlike a normal download that just maxes until it's done. Finding the source can be a pain without any tools. If you get your ISP to look at it and it's just traffic you're generating yourself they might bill you. All they do is plug the modem into their pc and do a line test.

 

[bill001g]

It would be nice if hop 2 gave data but it is likely the same as hop3. Latency is either distance when there are no issue or data being held in a buffer because of congestion.

The first thing to check is if you are overloading your internet connection. You need to verify both upload and download rates. If your internet is fast say larger than 100down and 10 up it is not as likely you are overloading it. It should be very obvious what is overloading it if you have a connection that big. Things like dsl connections are much more easily overloaded.

So if you are not overloading your connection then the bad news is it might be a bunch of your neighbors overloading the connection from your neighborhood to the ISP. Normally when this happens it works better early in the morning but has issue during prime hours when people get home from work.

You are going to have a hard time getting a ISP to fix a overloaded connection in their network. They will either deny it or point out that they do not guarantee any minimum latency and show you that your speedtest still hit their rates. They might fix is if it is due to some broken of configured equipment.

But your first task is to see if maybe it is traffic from your house causing it.