Question Ping spikes every 5-10 minutes ?

[Tormentula]

Almost like clockwork every 5-10 minutes, ping will spike to ~800ms for a second. It'll show up at 800 on ping plotter and sometimes cmd prompt, depends on the timing of the ping interval what number it is. Hop 1, Hop 2, and google respectively;

This has been going on for 3 months. ISP agents came over 3 times, modem was swapped out 3 different times, cables were all replaced and tested, ping plotter shows the 800ms at random points, once at hop 1 which makes no sense, sometimes hop 2, 7, 10, etc.

I tried it on a wireless laptop, had the issue... on ethernet desktop... had the issue... redirected the laptop directly to the gateway avoiding ethernet entirely, still had the issue.

Whenever those spikes occur everything freezes up, multiplayer games like league desync, and its just making everything so much more frustrating. I'll try anything but I'm pretty sure I've tried it all since the ISP doesn't seem to know what the problem is.

 

[cruisetung]

The reality is that there is nothing you can do in most cases if the glitch is outside of your home network.

If it's so critical, change ISP or use a VPN to change your route see if it helps.

 

[bill001g]

These really should not cause that much issue. 200ms is a lot but you generally see a extremely short lag it does not completely freeze or disconnect. You can completely lose 1 packet and most times the game doesn't notice.

If you would get 2 or 3 in a row that is more of a problem.

You have to be very careful about pingplotter and even the normal ping command. Pingplotter for example will insist that it getting 100% loss on say hop 4 but hop 5 and past get no loss. This is technically not possible since the data must pass through hop 4 to get to hop 5.

The issue is you have people that will use a ping command to run denial of service attacks against routers. Most routers in the internet are designed so responding to ping is low on the list for the router to process. Some also limit the total amount they will respond to in a second.

You just have to know that you get a large amount of testing error using ping.

Not sure what to suggest. Swapping out the modem is always the first thing but is seldom the issue. Many years ago there were issues with certain chipset but they were fixed and there are must faster and newer chipset being used.

Do you have just a modem or a modem/router combo unit. If it is a combo unit can you put it in bridge mode. You want to plug a pc in without any NAT function. Highly unlikely it will make any difference but you have little else to try.

It will not be a cable or signal problem. Those cause packet loss..and are much simpler to fix. Latency spikes is mostly caused by some device getting more traffic that it can process and placing the data in memory rather than discarding it. This is what you see called bufferbloat but the problem is in the ISP equipment and nothing you can do because it is your traffic combined with everyone elses traffic that is overloading something.

I am somewhat surprised the ISP even cared about this. They do not promise any kind of latency and pretty much anything related to the physical connections is packet loss not latency.

 

[Tormentula]

Its not just 200, usually what I see is this;

https://imgur.com/KnQOdBh

View: https://imgur.com/KnQOdBh


Typically I'll be playing, everything freeze up, and then check my CPU + this to see if the freeze was detected, and that's usually what it displays, sometimes it shows 200, sometimes it shows 700-800. CPU shows nothing in terms of usage spikes, and after checking 3 different devices the problem persist with all of them.

This morning I went into router settings and increased the DHCP lease on the TP link router from 120 minutes to 2880 (max), still seeing the same spikes even though everything was renewed/released but seems less frequent now? I went to my nighthawk CM2050V settings, but there's no options anywhere to customize it at all? I noticed by doing the DHCP its almost like it happens less frequently, but it still happens (perhaps its a combination of DHCP updating on the router & DHCP updating on the modem?). Still happened with the ISP's gateways before I got my own modem. I also see its not sync'd when it happens... devices individually do it at different times but this modem doesnt even have wifi so i'd assume it'd just bundle them all off the tp-link router unless im very misguided on how DHCP works.

Manually writing down when this occurs via cmd;

10:13AM - Ethernet Desktop 300ms
-- tinkered with the TP-link's DHCP lease duration around half way here.
12:03PM - Ethernet Desktop 605ms
12:19PM - MSI laptop 900ms
12:34PM - Ethernet Desktop 201ms -- 31 minutes from previous
1:05:23PM - Ethernet Desktop 677ms -- 31 minutes from previous
1:36PM - Ethernet Desktop 266ms -- 31 minutes from previous (watching for 2:07)
1:43PM - MSI laptop 726ms -- ping plotter actually didn't pick up on this while cmd did.
1:46PM - MSI laptop 130ms (probably irrelevant)
1:49PM - MSI laptop 1775ms -- new peak, didnt show on pingplotter, watching for 1:52)
1:52PM - MSI laptop 1009ms
1:52:58PM - MSI Laptop 923ms
ignoring laptop for now
2:07:21PM - Ethernet Desktop 786ms -- 31 minutes, nearly the same second mark, 2:38 surely the next.
2:23PM - Ethernet Desktop 507ms -- 16 minutes, breaks the pattern, still going to see what 2:38 does.
2:38:23PM - Ethernet Desktop 476ms -- 31 minutes from the 2:07, making 2:23 somewhat of a midway point.

There seems to be a consistency of the 31 minute runtime part, but the nighthawk modem event logs dont show anything at those time stamps while the router DHCP was moved to 2 day intervals. Just now after watching those spikes, I made the DHCP pool 1 singular ip.

 

[JayGau]

I got the exact same issue like 3 or 4 years ago. Sudden very high ping that was disconnecting me from my games every 5 minutes and both my wife and I were getting kicked out of our work servers. I fought with my ISP for several weeks about this problem, they sent 3 technicians to test my connection (and they charged me for the three visits). They replaced the modem but I knew it was not the problem since I already had another one and it was doing the same.

One morning I was really upset and told them I was no longer doing their bs troubleshoot that I already did 10 times and said I wanted the problem to be resolved right now. They replied that they couldn't do anything for the moment because there was an outage in my area... and a few minutes later we lost internet for several hours, and when it came back the problem was fixed. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

So I know how frustrating it can be but don't give and keep complaining to your ISP. At some point they might get so tired of you that they will finally do something.

 

[bill001g]

It is not a DHCP problem. First you would see issues to the router IP. When DHCP times out you will get packet loss. I think you get some other strange message like general failure or something.

Again these delays are being caused by something holding the data in a buffer.

 

[Tormentula]

Yesterday (after messing with some router stuff) I tried;

- making sure all devices are completely shutdown, testing them 1 by 1 to rule out one of the devices being a source effecting the network, all of them tested individually had the issue.

- unplugging the ethernet to the router entirely, and plugging the ethernet from my desktop directly into the modem, just to rule out router or the ethernet going from modem-2-router at all, still saw the issue. Also checked the ipconfig while attached to the modem to try and find any variables and nothing correlates, even the lease timing didn't sync.

The spikes seem to occur almost pattern-like, when I mentioned every 31 minutes, its either always in that ~30 minute range or half mark (sometimes nothing happens in 15 minutes, sometimes it does)

Back to modem - > router - > desktop;

11:10AM - pinging to google, hop 3, and hop 1 (hop 2 won't ping at all, request invalid)
Spike is seen as 800ms at google, 500ms at hop 3, wasn't running hop 1 for this attempt.
11:26 - 429ms on google, 92ms hop 3, nothing on hop 1.
11:41 - 50ms on google, 642ms on hop 3, nothing on hop 1. (likely because my cmds aren't perfectly sync'd)
12:12PM - I actually setup a recording in advance, predicting this would occur and to give a visual of the effects occurring, jump to 1:17;

View: https://youtu.be/Erm3s_7_aCY


1:19 is when the spike happens and 1:20 is when the effects are visible. My move input doesn't work, and you see everything teleport/snap to re-sync. The in-game MS goes up and the ISP I'm pinging shows a >500ms spike. The 3 minutes timestamp is me predicting that 3 min = 12:12, seconds are not 1:1 but within the ballpark considering I was likely off a couple trying to reset the game timer on 12:09 to try and sync it up. Ignore 89ms I'm on PBE (public testing server its supposed to be averagely high, I'm 35ms on live servers).

Idk if this is packet loss, bufferbloat, or what considering the other info. It definitely can't be a loose or broken cable wire I'd assume as the intervals are too consistent and long enough for that.

I'm attempting to communicate with the ISP on as much information as possible to hopefully open an investigation on their end.

 

[bill001g]

No ping on hop2 is pain but you can thank the children who just have to "win" even if that means attacking a ISP router the person they don't like connects to.

When I put my tin foil hat on I say it is because the ISP does not want to let you have a way to prove they have a issue to your house. Hop 3 is likely the same ISP.

This is going to be tough. You know the problem is likely in the ISP network. It is not the simple problem of a damaged cable or dirty connection. This is some electronic device delaying the data. The ISP can also do ping commands. They likely can ping from the hop 2 router even if it doesn't respond. There likely is other equipment in the path that you can not see with a trace that the ISP can get into and test. It all depends on if you find a ISP tech that is willing to do the testing. Most ISP tech are more rewarded with closing the tickets quickly that actually successfully resolving them....they will try to say it is your pc or something so they can close the ticket.

Do you have any other option for ISP. I can get both att fiber and spectrum coax. I figured spectrum would decide to offer better service when att came in but they are still a lot more expensive and their network is still has issues all the time.