ICMP latency vs TCP latency

[AWalker09]

Hi. I play an online game with server located in France. I am from India and hence my normal latency is around 180-250 ms. During daytime(in India), my in-game latency fluctuates aggressively between 400-1000 ms, while a normal ping via cmd or Resource Monitor shows ping of ~200 ms. The game I play (WoW) uses TCP. Past midnight however, both normal and in-game ping shows ~180ms. My question is, whether this is something my ISP (or I) can solve. Whether TCP latency is more affected by traffic than ICMP.

If it's a routing issue, is there any hope in asking my ISP to fix it?
I can provide my traceroute log if need be. And finally, I'm fairly new to all this, so please explain in detail if you can. Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

Been a while since I looked at wow but most games use UDP for the actual game content. This means there really is no concept of packet acknowledgment at the network level. The application itself is somehow determining the latency using whatever metric it decides....most include server and client overhead.

With TCP you can if you work at it very hard see the actually packet acknowledgments in a packet capture. This would should a lot closer to the actual network latency since it is done by the low level network. Any other monitoring tool will be affected by the application overhead of that tool.

In general ICMP actually should have worse performance than TCP or UDP. It is generally set at a lower priority by many end devices so if they are busy they will process actual data before processing ICMP messages.

Still it likely does not matter a lot since it sounds like it is not a problem you can fix. If it would happen all the time you could look at game settings....video setting sometimes affect games ping numbers. Strange but it is because in game ping is not actually ICMP so video overhead can affect it.

Since it only happens at certain times of day you could blame the servers for overload but with wow even fully loaded servers seem to perform very well. This then leaves some ISP causing you a issue. Now if it was a overload condition ICMP would be affected also. This sound more like some ISP has some form of traffic filter or traffic shaper on the network. It would be massively hard to find since you can't see it with ICMP.

Be very sure you are pinging the game server and not the authentication server they can have very different paths because many times they are located at different locations.

Talking to the ISP likely is a waste of time....getting past the first level guy that does not know what ICMP or TCP mean is a challenge.

What may help is one of the gaming VPN. These at least claim to provide better network pathing which should reduce latency. It is mostly smoke and mirrors but it can help if there is a ISP in the path that is causing problems, the vpn may not pass though the same path.