Question My PC has ping spiking starting from a few days ago, what do I do?

[Academe]

My ping has been spiking exclusively on my pc from around 30 to 100+ in games and discord calls. I have tried resetting all the ipconfig stuff like ipconfig /renew and flushdns and such, I just did it a bit earlier and it fixed the problem for a couple of minutes until it came back again. It happens on ethernet and wifi but only for my PC since I tested my speeds on my phone right next to the modem and it was perfectly normal. I use an ethernet switch to connect my router to my pc and it has not had any problems before a couple of days ago and it basically came out of nowhere since it was around a week after the winter storm. I currently use Spectrum and I have yet to contact them about it but I assume it's my pc's problem. What should I try? I've used a network latency view program and it showed me for some of my connections that the 4th hop was spiking from 30 to 90 ms and I don't know what is wrong. I've pinged my own router and 8.8.8.8 and the router is consistently at less than 1 ms while pinging 8.8.8.8 shows that every few pings it would spike around +100 ms or higher.

 

[bill001g]

Your testing must be flawed your phone and your pc take the same exact path between the router and 8.8.8.8. If one is having issue the other must also. If it was your pc or its connection to the router you would see the spikes when you test to the router.

This is not uncommon but in general you are not going to get the ISP do anything they don't guarantee any latency.

In general when this is not on wifi this means that there is some kind of overload on the network. It is unlikely you are exceeding the bandwidth you buy from your ISP. This means it is some common resource in the ISP network or maybe even another ISP.

You could try a tracert and try to find the first hop where you see it. In many ways you hope it is in hop 2, maybe you get lucky it is some problem with the isp equipment coming to your house or the modem.

 

[Academe]

Yes I agree that the testing with the phone is not good since all I did on my phone was use speedtest.net right next to my router and the speed was perfectly at the normal speed of 360 mbps down and 10 mbps up. My pc that is connected by ethernet is displaying a 300 mbps down and 9 mbps up and it varies between 280-310 down and 8-10 up. It moves around a lot during the speedtest which is why I determined that my pc is the problem and not the internet itself.

 

[Academe]

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 30 ms 15 ms 34 ms 071-076-096-001.res.spectrum.com [71.76.96.1]
3 13 ms 21 ms 17 ms lag-54.chrbnccf02h.netops.charter.com [174.111.102.234]
4 17 ms 14 ms 19 ms lag-62.chrbnccf04r.netops.charter.com [24.93.70.66]
5 24 ms 14 ms 20 ms lag-41.rcr01chrcnctr.netops.charter.com [24.93.67.204]
6 38 ms 40 ms 60 ms lag-414.atlngamq46w-bcr00.netops.charter.com [66.109.7.196]
7 24 ms 42 ms 113 ms 74.125.146.84
8 37 ms 31 ms 23 ms 108.170.249.161
9 20 ms 24 ms 22 ms 192.178.74.77
10 415 ms 25 ms 19 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]

This is my tracert to 8.8.8.8 on my pc.

 

[bill001g]

Speedtest results are too crude to show actual issues. A tracert seldom show actual issues unless you run it a lot. It does not run long enough to find problems. It really is only used to find the ip addresses of the routers in the path so you can do further testing.

What you now want to do is open a couple cmd windows and leave constant ping run to 71.76.96.1. This is the first ISP router and will test the connection between your house and the ISP. This really is the only thing the ISP will even consider fixing for you.

You also want to leave a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. If you see no issue to your ISP router but you see issues to 8.8.8.8 it is not going to be a simple issue, it could be in another ISP network.

In general even 20-30ms of variation can be testing error. If you see spikes over 100ms that likely is a issue but it tend to be right on the edge of affecting stuff like online games. In your tracert assuming it is not testing error you did see a spike over 400ms and that will definitely affect a game.

 

[Academe]

I pinged the ISP router and it spikes to around 100-400+ every 10 or so pings. My ISP is sending out a technician tomorrow to check things out. I'll post an update after the technician leaves tomorrow.