Need help debugging latecy/ping spikes

riahim

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Jan 13, 2012
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If someone could help me figuring out where the issue lies that is resulting in ping spikes, that would be great. I'm not sure if it's my wifi card, router, isp, or something different. However, I used to not have this issue. It only started happening about 2 weeks ago and is mostly evident while gaming since I get the ping spikes and my character bounces back.

Yes, I am using wifi but I connecting via Ethernet directly is not an option. But like I said, I didn't used to have this issue before.

Any help debugging would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks


 
Solution


The only thing you can easily get fixed is when you are seeing issues with the connection between your house and the ISP. You should see no problems to your router on wired but see issues with the second hop which represents the wire between you and the ISP.

If you have issue farther away it gets extremely hard to convince the ISP to do anything. These issue would be completely within the ISP network or maybe even in other ISP networks.
You really need to test with ethernet to see if the problem is something in your equipment or if it is something ISP needs to fix.

The reason wireless is never recommended for games is you get random interference. Even though you may not have changed something one of your neighbors may have. Everyone pretty much has at least 1 wireless router and some have multiple. Some of the newest tri band router attempt to use all the available radio channels so they pretty much guarantee to interfere. So if someone got a new router or just changed the channel you can be affected.

There really is no good solution for this since you have no control over people around you which is why you never play games on wireless.

Still you need to test on wired maybe it is a issue with the ISP. For wireless all you can do is the standard change the radio channel, maybe set the channel width to 20mhz to reduce you chance of conflict. Still everyone is changing channels like you trying to improve there stuff and you could get stomped on again tomorrow.
 


Yeah I know gaming is recommended on wired connections, but that just isn't possible with the setup I have now...
I do have pretty good download speeds (~20-30 Mbps) and have a solid docsis 3 modem, router, and wireless card.
Are there any software checks I can take (ping, tracert, progrmas, etc) to help isolate the issue?
The modem setting (channel, power, etc) should be fine. I can see which channel has the least interference so it's there and it's been there for a while.
 
Any errors in the wireless will mask any other problems. You can ping your router and the isp router and hop you only see errors on the ISP router and not yours.

Download speeds mean little since they can tolerate packet latency variation and loss games can not.
 


The only thing you can easily get fixed is when you are seeing issues with the connection between your house and the ISP. You should see no problems to your router on wired but see issues with the second hop which represents the wire between you and the ISP.

If you have issue farther away it gets extremely hard to convince the ISP to do anything. These issue would be completely within the ISP network or maybe even in other ISP networks.
 
Solution