Question Need help reading traceroute and pathping results

[smoochiepook]

I'll go ahead and describe the issue I've been having first.

Suddenly started experiencing high ping spikes (300-400ms) in-game a couple weeks ago. As far as I know (since I don't have any other games I can test), this problem only occurs in Overwatch. I can browse websites and watch videos just fine without any buffer/lag/etc..

Contacted Overwatch support, sent them a WinMTR test (as well as system specs/info), and they vaguely concluded that the issue was with my ISP. However, each time I contact my ISP they say that everything is fine on their end, which is very misleading/confusing?

I've been trying to analyze these tests myself and I think I understand some of it?? But definitely not enough and I would really love some help!

What do these tests say? Do they confirm that the issue is with my ISP?? Or do they point at something else?

**Something I noticed that may or may not be significant?: I decided to unplug my ethernet to see if my ping would get better or worse, and it actually appeared to be better in-game. I ran a WinMTR test and found that the ping spikes were around 90-100ms instead of 300-400ms. That doesn't make any sense to me; how is the ping better on a wireless connection? What could the problem be, that would be worsened through an ethernet connection?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

In your above example the anomaly is well past your provider. You have no control over this.

 

[smoochiepook]

In your above example the anomaly is well past your provider. You have no control over this.

What do you mean by "well past your provider?"

 

[ex_bubblehead]

What do you mean by "well past your provider?"

It's outside your provider's network and therefore out of both their and your control.

 

[smoochiepook]

It's outside your provider's network and therefore out of both their and your control.

Whose control is it in? Would it be worth having a tech physically check it out? My modem, etc..

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Do a 'whois' lookup on the IP address. That will tell you who's network it is.

https://www.whois.com/whois/137.221.69.29

And no, you can't call a tech to look at it.

 

[smoochiepook]

I think I <Mod Edit> up by not showing the WinMTR results?

Do a 'whois' lookup on the IP address. That will tell you who's network it is.

https://www.whois.com/whois/137.221.69.29

And no, you can't call a tech to look at it.

The IP belongs to one of the game's datacenters. But it's in the Netherlands????

Did you pick that IP because that's where the high ping is? The WinMTR test showed high ping on all of Comcast's IPs as well (plus that datacenter in the Netherlands).

 

[bill001g]

Maybe there is a issue in the connection between your house and the ISP.

It is a very minor issue because your average rate is still very good so there are very few packets that get delayed.

Your big problem is the ISP barely says they will give you xxxx mbps. They in no way promise any kind of latency.

High latency is being caused by data being held in a buffer. Maybe you are exceeding the bandwidth you pay for and your data is being buffered. That you could fix if you could find the app doing the upload or download.
The issue might be that the overloaded is being caused by the combination of your traffic and your neihbors traffic which shares the cables to the ISP. The ISP will never admit they oversold the network and even if they did they can't really fix it without upgrading the network.


I suspect though that this is testing error since the other tools do not show it. Hard to say. What you would really want to see is packet loss not delay. The ISP will fix packet loss because that is mostly caused by defective equipment.

 

[smoochiepook]

Maybe there is a issue in the connection between your house and the ISP.

It is a very minor issue because your average rate is still very good so there are very few packets that get delayed.

Your big problem is the ISP barely says they will give you xxxx mbps. They in no way promise any kind of latency.

High latency is being caused by data being held in a buffer. Maybe you are exceeding the bandwidth you pay for and your data is being buffered. That you could fix if you could find the app doing the upload or download.
The issue might be that the overloaded is being caused by the combination of your traffic and your neihbors traffic which shares the cables to the ISP. The ISP will never admit they oversold the network and even if they did they can't really fix it without upgrading the network.


I suspect though that this is testing error since the other tools do not show it. Hard to say. What you would really want to see is packet loss not delay. The ISP will fix packet loss because that is mostly caused by defective equipment.

By upgrading the network, do you mean upgrading to another plan? Because I'm on their second-to-best plan (1000Mbps, Gigabit Internet). The only thing I could really pay more for is Unlimited Data, but I genuinely don't think we need more than 1.2TB. And we did happen to go +19GB over our 1.2TB data limit for the first time last month, but my bandwidth readings still appear to be completely fine?

Or did you mean upgrading my ISP's equipment? My ISP is sending a tech over soon and I'm not sure if there will even be a problem for them to fix. Is it worth having them take a look though?

 

[bill001g]

I guess my upgrading comment was confusing. By upgrade I mean the ISP digs up the street and runs more cable/fiber to have less houses share the same wires. This will never happen. It is rare to overload the ISP network in your neighborhood with modern networks.

With a plan as fast as your the only way you can overload the connection is on upload and that would only be something like a cloud backup in your house. This is very unlikely but I guess you could check to be sure no big upload is running on your machines.

What matters most is how often does the high ping happen. You might be better off just running simple ping command to a common address like 8.8.8.8. You could also test to 96.120.24.121 which is your ISP first router. You would let a continuous ping run in a background window and see if the ping spikes correspond with issues you see in game. In many ways it would be better if it was not a actual network problem and is some strange issue in the game causing the machine to get stuck in say a video rendering process.

Real ping spikes are almost always data being held in a buffer waiting for other traffic to be transmitted. This is not as simple as broken equipment that drops damaged data.

 

[SkyNetRising]

**Something I noticed that may or may not be significant?: I decided to unplug my ethernet to see if my ping would get better or worse, and it actually appeared to be better in-game.

What does that mean?
Do you have ethernet and wifi enabled simultaneously?

Have only single interface enabled. Both of them connected to same network will cause problems.
If you're using wifi, then disable ethernet.
If you're using ethernet, then disable wifi.

 

[smoochiepook]

I guess my upgrading comment was confusing. By upgrade I mean the ISP digs up the street and runs more cable/fiber to have less houses share the same wires. This will never happen. It is rare to overload the ISP network in your neighborhood with modern networks.

With a plan as fast as your the only way you can overload the connection is on upload and that would only be something like a cloud backup in your house. This is very unlikely but I guess you could check to be sure no big upload is running on your machines.

What matters most is how often does the high ping happen. You might be better off just running simple ping command to a common address like 8.8.8.8. You could also test to 96.120.24.121 which is your ISP first router. You would let a continuous ping run in a background window and see if the ping spikes correspond with issues you see in game. In many ways it would be better if it was not a actual network problem and is some strange issue in the game causing the machine to get stuck in say a video rendering process.

Real ping spikes are almost always data being held in a buffer waiting for other traffic to be transmitted. This is not as simple as broken equipment that drops damaged data.

You're right, there is no big upload on any of my devices, and there usually never is. (Not sure if I can even check specific upload/download data because I don't think that's a feature within our modem, which is an xFi Gateway. Literally feels like I'm being blocked from troubleshooting.)
And honestly the things you're saying probably aren't confusing, this area is just not my specialty so it's even more difficult to understand. Sorry about that. I'm trying really hard to comprehend

Ping spikes do correspond with in-game issues. I have my ping showing at all times while I'm playing, so whenever I start to notice a delay/lag I'll glance at the ping and see that it's spiked from 20ms to 100-300ms. Depending on the length of the match, significant lag/delay can happen up to five times.

I did run some hardware tests on my laptop to check for any notable failures, but I couldn't report any. Really no idea where to go from here if a tech can't help because I am incapable of a non-simple fix

 

[smoochiepook]

What does that mean?
Do you have ethernet and wifi enabled simultaneously?

Have only single interface enabled. Both of them connected to same network will cause problems.
If you're using wifi, then disable ethernet.
If you're using ethernet, then disable wifi.

No, I had both ethernet and wifi enabled separately.

 

[bill001g]

I would see if you can get another machine to run the constant ping. Goal here is to see if both machines are affected at the same time. If both are affected then it is more likely some network issue if only your game machine is affected it is more likely something related to the game or maybe windows is doing something stupid.
I would do your testing to the 96.120.24.121 ip address at least as the first tests. If you were to test to 8.8.8.8 the ISP may just say its the google network that has problems and you can't prove different. The only thing to be careful of is routers are designed to use their cpu power first to pass traffic and then if there is extra to process a ping response. There are also artificial limits to prevent someone from running denial of service attacks against the ISP routers. Pretty much you just want to be sure that both 8.8.8.8 and the ISP router show the same issue.

The big problem though is I don't know what the ISP can/will do about this. Its not likely a hardware issue, that is mostly packet loss. It might be a bug in the ISP router software but I doubt it which leaves some kind of traffic overload issue in the ISP network.

 

[bniknafs9]

games like overwatch are supported by many ping reduction , VPn's try them too .

 

[smoochiepook]

games like overwatch are supported by many ping reduction , VPn's try them too .

I can't buy a VPN right now. Thank you though.

 

[smoochiepook]

I would see if you can get another machine to run the constant ping. Goal here is to see if both machines are affected at the same time. If both are affected then it is more likely some network issue if only your game machine is affected it is more likely something related to the game or maybe windows is doing something stupid.
I would do your testing to the 96.120.24.121 ip address at least as the first tests. If you were to test to 8.8.8.8 the ISP may just say its the google network that has problems and you can't prove different. The only thing to be careful of is routers are designed to use their cpu power first to pass traffic and then if there is extra to process a ping response. There are also artificial limits to prevent someone from running denial of service attacks against the ISP routers. Pretty much you just want to be sure that both 8.8.8.8 and the ISP router show the same issue.

The big problem though is I don't know what the ISP can/will do about this. Its not likely a hardware issue, that is mostly packet loss. It might be a bug in the ISP router software but I doubt it which leaves some kind of traffic overload issue in the ISP network.

Thank you so much for your input. Needed a point in the right direction. Trying to diagnose this issue has been putting me through mental turmoil

 

[bill001g]

I can't buy a VPN right now. Thank you though.

That guy almost seems to be texting in short comments to lots of posts without actually reading them. VPN will make no difference at all because the problem seems to be in the connection between your house and the ISP. VPN traffic would still have to pass over this same connection it does not give you some magic internet connection that can totally bypass your ISP.

I would continue to try to see if you can find any pattern to when you get spikes to your ISP IP address.

 

[bniknafs9]

when the ping spikes it's where it's trying to reach europe or asia .

 

[bill001g]

when the ping spikes it's where it's trying to reach europe or asia .

No its not the problem hop 2. He is going to some server that appears to be near chicago if the names of the routers are correct. His average latency is so low he also must live fairly close to chicago. His traffic never leaves the USA

 

[smoochiepook]

I would see if you can get another machine to run the constant ping. Goal here is to see if both machines are affected at the same time. If both are affected then it is more likely some network issue if only your game machine is affected it is more likely something related to the game or maybe windows is doing something stupid.
I would do your testing to the 96.120.24.121 ip address at least as the first tests. If you were to test to 8.8.8.8 the ISP may just say its the google network that has problems and you can't prove different. The only thing to be careful of is routers are designed to use their cpu power first to pass traffic and then if there is extra to process a ping response. There are also artificial limits to prevent someone from running denial of service attacks against the ISP routers. Pretty much you just want to be sure that both 8.8.8.8 and the ISP router show the same issue.

The big problem though is I don't know what the ISP can/will do about this. Its not likely a hardware issue, that is mostly packet loss. It might be a bug in the ISP router software but I doubt it which leaves some kind of traffic overload issue in the ISP network.

Before running the constant ping on another machine, I wanted to trace the route to all of the IPs on my laptop first, just to see if any ping spikes would arise. I tested the game's server IP, the Comcast IPs and even my own IPv4 IP. All responses were 1-20ms-- except for one hop, when I traced the route to the game server's IP.

137.221.69.29 is an IP that belongs to one of the game's servers, which is a datacenter in the Netherlands.

This is where the traceroute says the problem is, but I think the difference between these traceroute and pathping tests and the WinMTr test, is that they are not tracing the route as I'm playing the video game. My ping only appears to spike in-game.

The traceroute tests all seem to say that everything is fine (aside from hop 10), but my WinMTR test, which was conducted while I was playing Overwatch, showed 300ms ping spikes through each IP except for my own router and one lucky Comcast router for some reason??

Could it be that Overwatch is too demanding for the wifi or something??? I just don't understand what would've suddenly made it too demanding though? I wasn't having these problems a month ago.

I ran a traceroute on my sister's laptop to the game's server IP and I came across the exact same ping spike my laptop had-- on the same hop and everything.

And again, it's saying the issue is that datacenter in the Netherlands, and the WinMTR test said that as well, but it also said that the other Comcast IPs were problematic. Except that's not what the traceroutes are saying?? I'm really confused ??

These are the traceroutes that show everything's "fine":

 

[bill001g]

You can't make many assumptions about random routers in the path that give high response times. They are not valid data. Lets put it this way if you had a list a traffic light you drove through on the way to work and 1 said it would delay you 15 minutes but you arrived to work at the normal times it means the report that said there was a delay was invalid. If a traffic light/node in the path causes delays it would cause every node past that point to also be delayed.

What happens is routers are configured to prioritize passing actual traffic. If they have extra time they will respond to test traffic like ping and tracert. In addition many routers are configured to only respond to a certain amount of this type of traffic to prevent denial of service attacks against the router cpu with a ping command.
This is why you see some routers randomly refuse to respond to ping and trace but if they were actually down you would not see any trace past that point.

You also can't not trust the location databases. Obviously your traffic can not be going all the way to the netherlands it would add extra delays far in excess of the 18ms you are seeing. It would add over 100ms to that node and every node past it.

Tracert does not really run long enough to find intermittent issues and it is really hard to run it at the same time you would say play a game.


Your current traces show no issues at all.

It can not be a wifi issue because you would see issue to your router. After it gets to your router it is converted to ethernet or fiber or whatever and there actually is no way to tell that you are using wifi from the traffic.

Now if you were to do a large download and then test the connection you would see every node past your router with higher latency. This is normal because you are using 100% of the bandwidth you purchase from the ISP and your test traffic must wait its turn or in some cases get discarded.
This is not the case with a online game though. A game uses almost no bandwidth, most are well under 1mbps. The difference is it uses both upload and download rates but again the rates are so low you are not going to exceed your upload rate.

It also is not likely your machine if you also see issues with the a real ping command while the game is running. You would see issues to the router since the machine can not affect the traffic once it is sent to the router. If background ping commands are fine but the game still reports high ping time then that can be a issue with the game. Some games are really stupid and say they get stuck in a some video rendering routine. When they finally complete and go to look for the "ping" packet the game uses it will blame the delay on the network when the data was sitting in a buffer waiting for the game to read it.