Question ping spikes, not sure about my pingplotter results

[gamingdepression]

internet speed:
download 20mbps
upload 0.4-0.5 mbps
hello, on the official pingplotter forum i didn't get support, well in the first results i did, but im confused, first i showed them these screenshots:

https://imgur.com/rRP53GJ

View: https://imgur.com/rRP53GJ

https://imgur.com/xsTgeDC

View: https://imgur.com/xsTgeDC



they said nothing here looks like the experience (ping/latency/packet burst spikes) im having in warzone, meanwhile in valorant my game ping also jumps to around 1000ms almost every 20 seconds, it's crazy, i read their instructions, everything on these screenshots signals a problem based on that, if im wrong, tell me, it's okay to be wrong

so after a pause i had i decided to do some more tests because my isp told me "everything is good, ping good, speed good, but there are flaws in the installations in your building which you need to take care of yourself"

posted those screens on pingplotter, but no reply from them for a long time, im stressed about this so hopefully i can get some help here until my isp tells me more details (cause based on these next results it doesn't seem like the isp is at fault)

https://imgur.com/v5xA3yQ

View: https://imgur.com/v5xA3yQ

https://imgur.com/jKi9ZAj

View: https://imgur.com/jKi9ZAj






obviously showing latency spikes starting from the router/my pc/eth cable that continue to the final hop (according to pingplotter instructions that's an issue that starts with router/cable/pc if the problem occurs at the final hop aswell)

maybe these latency spikes are not the actual problem? maybe the router doesn't like when i "ddos" it every 1 second lol tell me please

wanna know what's weird?

when i play valorant and have cmd opened running "ping -t 8.8.8.8" and when i get a ping spike it shows a spike in cmd also, but when i trace the same target 8.8.8.8 in pingplotter and play a game of valorant and get a ping spike it doesn't show it in pingplotter

??????????????????

also bufferbloat results from dslreports are horrible, sometimes f grade even:

results

please help me get to the bottom of this, i am a very competitive gamer and this is making me pretty depressed, the little time i lately have and can't spend it on video games is horrible (hence the username)

things i tried:

router reset
checking for viruses using malwarebytes after i scanned with windows defender as usual
everything is up to date
brand new windows 10 installation
new router

 

[bill001g]

Sounds like you have a better understanding of pingplotter than most people who post those traces here.

If it does not affect the final hop then you can ignore everything else in the trace. Your example that show 100% packet loss illustrate that, obviously is the loss was really 100% no traffic would ever get to the nodes past it but you see response from other nodes.

Routers in the path many time are designed to favor passing traffic rather than responding to test traffic, some also have limits to prevent denial of service attacks.

But in the end all your traces show no issues.

In this case you tested to the login server for world of tanks but when you actually play the game you are not likely running on login server. The actual game server could be in a different data center. You can find the IP of the actual server by watching the network tab of the resource monitor while the game is running you will see pretty much constant traffic to it.

I strongly suspect though you will not be able to test to the actual game server. Most times these are firewalled to prevent denial of service attacks and unless you know how they have structured stuff it is hard to say. Sometimes multiple servers share a common IP and they use different ports which you can not easily test using stuff like ping plotter.

Still it all doesn't matter a lot. You can only fix stuff in your house or to some extent in your ISP. The ping plotters you have show that the problem is not likely in the nodes you can do anything about. What would you do if you though the problem was say related to how there connection to their multiple ISP was done. Its not like the senior tech that would understand and be able to fix that will talk to you and the level 1 tech guys only really know about the game and not so much how to fix network issues......they would need to be paid lots more.

If you spent more time reading about bufferbloat you would soon find that site is a mostly garbage. You get bufferbloat when you load a connection to 100% and data much be placed in buffers rather than being discarded. Games unlike every other kind of traffic would actually prefer data be discarded rather than buffered. The problem would be why is your internet connection running at 100% in the first place. If it is not at 100% data is not being placed into buffers. That site intentionally will overload any connection to see how large the buffer are. What the site is actually useful for is

IF you are running at 100% load and you have no way to not run at 100% you can use special QoS that will reduce the bufferbloat for games. The site is then used to check how well you configured the QoS settings. It is very tricky to get it tuned just right.

Unfortunately people just click the test button and see "red bad" must fix rather than understanding that it only matters if you are attempting to exceed your bandwidth which is the actual problem not that the data is being placed into buffers.

In the end I suspect you do not have a actual network issue.

Some common things to check.

First be very sure there is no so called "gamer" qos software loaded. This comes bundled with motherboards and video cards sometimes. A very common name is called CFOSspeed. Any software like this needs to be unistalled. It can do nothing about traffic outside your machine and if you have a overloaded network inside your machine you have much larger issues than some silly software can fix. This software just causes all kinds of strange issues.

I would also check the network driver on your machine. Make sure windows did not install some generic driver. The ones used on 2.5g ports from microsoft were very flaky when they first came out.

After this you start to suspect the game is telling lies. What can happen is the game can say get stuck rendering some video image and when it finally gets around to looking for the response to its ping/network test it blames the extra delay on the network rather than it being too busy to actually calculate the proper latency. This is why you see people say they fixed these so called network issues by changing video settings which makes no sense since the video does not actually go over the network.

 

[gamingdepression]

Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful response. I learned a lot, but you left me confused, my pingplotter shows latency lately, no packet loss, latency. To be fair this DOES NOT happen when my game ping spikes.

And you say there are no network issues, but my game ping spikes and my character rubberbands, sometimes packet loss is involved, but rarely. Do you see why this is confusing?

No such gamer software btw haha, I know those things and tweaks are bs, running latest ethernet from the mbo drivers page.

So if all my traces show no issues and I constantly get ingame lag it's my pc?

Btw my pc does feel a bit unresponsive, like it has input lag, especially when typing, but all benchmarks, temps etc are fine, xmp enabled

 

[bill001g]

I don't see a latency issue in your pingplot traces. First the problem with latency and games is inconsistent latency...ie jitter. It is a very complex thing but games take into account the extra time it take between when the data is created on the server and when it is deliviers to the end machine.
If the latency were to change then the estimated positions the server used when it sent the data would be wrong. Now if the latency was very high say above 150 or so MS that makes it much harder for games to estimate the future positions accurately.

You consistently get in the 50-60ms range at least to the login server.

The only strange thing I see about your pingplot is sometimes hop 2 does not respond and why do you have over 30ms of latency in the hop2/3. It appears the delay is almost all in hop 2 it only takes about a extra 5ms to get to google dns which is likely in a city near you.

Many people on fiber get under 3ms of delay on the connection between their house and the ISP (ie hop 2). Cable systems are in the 10ms range. DSL can be more but ones with high latency tend to be very slow also. This almost looks like you are using mobile broadband.
Those type of connection if you are lucky only have higher latency but most times they also have lots of random spikes in latency and packet loss as the cell tower adjust to all the different mobile devices joining and leaving the tower.

This is also what a connection looks like when you have a VPN running on your router, the vpn is hiding the actual path between your router and vpn data center which would be hop 2 in those cases.

You have to be very careful about focusing on one area. I suspect it is because games blame the network for almost all their issues even when say a server CPU is overloaded on a launch day. I suspect gamers would be blindly replacing power supplies if games put out warning messages when a game has no real ability to test a power supply. So if you had 10 network testing tools and 9 said there was no problem but 1 said there was a problem most people would know that the issue was the 1 tool and not that 9 were wrong. Gamers for some reason always believe the game and disregard testing tools.

Now if it is actually a network issue the big issue is figuring out what is different between how the game is testing and how the tools are testing. The obvious one is the location they are testing to and a second on in many games is they do not actually use the ping command they can measure the latency of the actual live data. You can see something similar if you look at the network tab in the resource manager and look at the open sessions, it actually shows the latency to web sites you are using. This feature does not work on most games because they UDP rather than TCP to transfer data so the tool used in resource manager can not determine the latency.

The huge problem is you are now getting into massively detailed stuff you can't likely fix. You only have control of, Your pc, your router, and to some small extent the connection you pay your ISP for between your house and the ISP. Nothing past that point...ie hop2 in the trace...you can do nothing about. You would be wasting a lot of effort if say google had a bad router in their network, its not like you can driver over and replace it.

The most likely cause is some strange setting in the pc. It likely though is not a true network issue. If you have multiple monitor maybe leave a constant ping run in a command window run to various IP...espeically your router, and see it detects a issue on the game. You could also run other monitoring tools on the second monitor, simple resource manager is a good one since you can see spikes in cpu and memory and disk usage.

I mean you could try to set everything in the game to the lowest video settings and see if it changes anything. A game sends the same amount of data no matter how you choose to display it.


.

 

[gamingdepression]

I don't see a latency issue in your pingplot traces. First the problem with latency and games is inconsistent latency...ie jitter. It is a very complex thing but games take into account the extra time it take between when the data is created on the server and when it is deliviers to the end machine.
If the latency were to change then the estimated positions the server used when it sent the data would be wrong. Now if the latency was very high say above 150 or so MS that makes it much harder for games to estimate the future positions accurately.

You consistently get in the 50-60ms range at least to the login server.

The only strange thing I see about your pingplot is sometimes hop 2 does not respond and why do you have over 30ms of latency in the hop2/3. It appears the delay is almost all in hop 2 it only takes about a extra 5ms to get to google dns which is likely in a city near you.

Many people on fiber get under 3ms of delay on the connection between their house and the ISP (ie hop 2). Cable systems are in the 10ms range. DSL can be more but ones with high latency tend to be very slow also. This almost looks like you are using mobile broadband.
Those type of connection if you are lucky only have higher latency but most times they also have lots of random spikes in latency and packet loss as the cell tower adjust to all the different mobile devices joining and leaving the tower.

This is also what a connection looks like when you have a VPN running on your router, the vpn is hiding the actual path between your router and vpn data center which would be hop 2 in those cases.

You have to be very careful about focusing on one area. I suspect it is because games blame the network for almost all their issues even when say a server CPU is overloaded on a launch day. I suspect gamers would be blindly replacing power supplies if games put out warning messages when a game has no real ability to test a power supply. So if you had 10 network testing tools and 9 said there was no problem but 1 said there was a problem most people would know that the issue was the 1 tool and not that 9 were wrong. Gamers for some reason always believe the game and disregard testing tools.

Now if it is actually a network issue the big issue is figuring out what is different between how the game is testing and how the tools are testing. The obvious one is the location they are testing to and a second on in many games is they do not actually use the ping command they can measure the latency of the actual live data. You can see something similar if you look at the network tab in the resource manager and look at the open sessions, it actually shows the latency to web sites you are using. This feature does not work on most games because they UDP rather than TCP to transfer data so the tool used in resource manager can not determine the latency.

The huge problem is you are now getting into massively detailed stuff you can't likely fix. You only have control of, Your pc, your router, and to some small extent the connection you pay your ISP for between your house and the ISP. Nothing past that point...ie hop2 in the trace...you can do nothing about. You would be wasting a lot of effort if say google had a bad router in their network, its not like you can driver over and replace it.

The most likely cause is some strange setting in the pc. It likely though is not a true network issue. If you have multiple monitor maybe leave a constant ping run in a command window run to various IP...espeically your router, and see it detects a issue on the game. You could also run other monitoring tools on the second monitor, simple resource manager is a good one since you can see spikes in cpu and memory and disk usage.

I mean you could try to set everything in the game to the lowest video settings and see if it changes anything. A game sends the same amount of data no matter how you choose to display it.


.

Thank you for a very detailed reply, you still left me confused though. Can you explain why a latency spike to around 200 is not causing problems? First and last hop have it. It's because it's not constant?

I am a competitive gamer, as soon as the game is installed all settings are set to the lowest possible.

In short, if cmd ping to 8.8.8.8 shows a spike that correlates with the spike I got ingame it's 100% the internet? Or no? Could be pc? The spike doesn't happen when I just ping 8.8.8.8 without playing the game. To me, it sounds like a stupid question, but I'm desperate lol

 

[bill001g]

You have to be careful about single random errors in these tools. It could be a issue with the test and not be a real problem or even if it was 1 packet lost or delayed here and there you will never see. It tends to be when you start seeing say 1% packet loss you can really tell.

The delays to the first hop are even more problematic because the only way they can happen is either the router cpu is busy and can not respond or your PC cpu is busy and did not read the response. The actual network cable and the ports can not delay the traffic.

This is much more likely that it is some bottleneck in the pc itself. This is more getting tools that monitor the pc itself and see if you are getting say a memory bottle neck or maybe a gpu or cpu hitting some limit. Way to many variables. A real network issue does not look like the results you have posted.

 

[gamingdepression]

You have to be careful about single random errors in these tools. It could be a issue with the test and not be a real problem or even if it was 1 packet lost or delayed here and there you will never see. It tends to be when you start seeing say 1% packet loss you can really tell.

The delays to the first hop are even more problematic because the only way they can happen is either the router cpu is busy and can not respond or your PC cpu is busy and did not read the response. The actual network cable and the ports can not delay the traffic.

This is much more likely that it is some bottleneck in the pc itself. This is more getting tools that monitor the pc itself and see if you are getting say a memory bottle neck or maybe a gpu or cpu hitting some limit. Way to many variables. A real network issue does not look like the results you have posted.

I don't get packet loss, that's rare ingame, ingame I have ping spikes/latency (whatever the game chooses to call it) and cmd shows high ms jumps
edit: thank you btw I'll try more testing now, with afterburner

edit2: what I'm REALLY interested about is if I get no ping spikes on cmd and I get pingspikes when ingame you're sure it could be pc?
0.5 upload is enough for games, right? I saw a lot of recommendations online for higher uploads, but netduma on youtube clearly tested and explained that games do not need good upload or download, all they need is a good stable connection and low pings, they even showed results of games using like 100kbps upload

also i saw you mention in another thread something about 2.5g ports being bad

i have a b450 tomahawk max, it has a realtek 8111h adapter, just throwing it out there, maybe you know it causes issues sometimes, thanks

Sorry, I just want to be mega sure <3

 

[bill001g]

I missed that you were running on such a small upload connection. These are rather uncommon now days.

Yes if you were to exceed that very small upload rate you will see a latency spike. Your pc or maybe other devices in the house can send data much faster to the router than it can send out on the internet connection. It will place the data in a memory buffer rather than discard it but it will now cause a delay while it waits for the upload connect to because available to send the packet.

The exact rate you need greatly depends on the game. Used to be you needed very little, I mean years ago World of Warcraft ran on dialup phone lines. Most games attempt to use as little as possible so that customer like you can play their games. I mean if they require 1gbit upload they would not have many customers.
I have not looked at the exact rates for games in years,most were well under 500kbps but I know there was discussion of some game wanting almost 1 full mbit but I didn't pay much attention.

When you have that small a internet connection you must be very careful. Even running test traffic like ping can have a impact. You want to be sure that pc is the only device on your network and that you have all other windows closed. Things like web browsers are constantly sending small requests to update all the crappy advertising even if you are not actively using a web page. The other thing to be concerned about is using third party voice comms like discord.

I would try to watch the resource manager to see the rates your pc is using the network to see how close you are to the limit. You are looking for some program that you do not expect to be using data or maybe the game is attempting to use too much.
Maybe your router has the ability to monitor usage but this would only matter if you have multiple devices attached. It does not take much to spike that small amount of upload rate. A modern web page has a huge number of small URL requests being made and even though they are small all together they can cause a spike on a very small connection.

 

[gamingdepression]

I missed that you were running on such a small upload connection. These are rather uncommon now days.

Yes if you were to exceed that very small upload rate you will see a latency spike. Your pc or maybe other devices in the house can send data much faster to the router than it can send out on the internet connection. It will place the data in a memory buffer rather than discard it but it will now cause a delay while it waits for the upload connect to because available to send the packet.

The exact rate you need greatly depends on the game. Used to be you needed very little, I mean years ago World of Warcraft ran on dialup phone lines. Most games attempt to use as little as possible so that customer like you can play their games. I mean if they require 1gbit upload they would not have many customers.
I have not looked at the exact rates for games in years,most were well under 500kbps but I know there was discussion of some game wanting almost 1 full mbit but I didn't pay much attention.

When you have that small a internet connection you must be very careful. Even running test traffic like ping can have a impact. You want to be sure that pc is the only device on your network and that you have all other windows closed. Things like web browsers are constantly sending small requests to update all the crappy advertising even if you are not actively using a web page. The other thing to be concerned about is using third party voice comms like discord.

I would try to watch the resource manager to see the rates your pc is using the network to see how close you are to the limit. You are looking for some program that you do not expect to be using data or maybe the game is attempting to use too much.
Maybe your router has the ability to monitor usage but this would only matter if you have multiple devices attached. It does not take much to spike that small amount of upload rate. A modern web page has a huge number of small URL requests being made and even though they are small all together they can cause a spike on a very small connection.

I did notice worse performance when I was in discord voice. hmmm, I'll check this now
the funny thing is, my isp never told me "your upload sucks nothing we can do about it"

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDUJF7LZYxQ

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTEFJcEPGk8



this is what i watched that made me think my upload doesn't matter, it says call of duty bo3 uses around 60 kbit/s, that's 0.060 Mbit, way less than my upload speed

btw i know other activity mixed with gaming is gonna make things lag on a slow connection don't worry lol, everything is turned off when i game

edit: this is my network graph while playing valorant, consistent spikes on the graph

https://prnt.sc/7OWO4E17MGmD

sometimes i feel it, sometimes i don't, the network io number goes from around 100k to 2-3 million, usually sits around 200-400k

and is the graph upload or download?

 

[bill001g]

Since I have had a larger connection for years I have not bothered to really look at what modern games want.

I would not blindly trust youtube videos. They are correct you do not need "high" speed bandwidth but the vast majority of internet connections have 10mbit or more upload only a extremely small number are under 1mbps. You need to check the particular game you are using.

There are tools that will log network usage to a file, I think hwinfo64 will but it is tool used more to monitor cpu cores etc so it is complex but it is free. Leaving the simple resource manager network tab up on a second monitor if that is a option likely will be ok. I think it will also run in the background if you only have a single monitor. The problem is these are "average" values and it might hide a spike depending on how the average is taken. This is a complex issue since it is all based on how you measure it. Very technically the port runs at 1gbit or 0gbit all the time but that would be a worthless number also.

 

[gamingdepression]

Since I have had a larger connection for years I have not bothered to really look at what modern games want.

I would not blindly trust youtube videos. They are correct you do not need "high" speed bandwidth but the vast majority of internet connections have 10mbit or more upload only a extremely small number are under 1mbps. You need to check the particular game you are using.

There are tools that will log network usage to a file, I think hwinfo64 will but it is tool used more to monitor cpu cores etc so it is complex but it is free. Leaving the simple resource manager network tab up on a second monitor if that is a option likely will be ok. I think it will also run in the background if you only have a single monitor.

I can't monitor it, valorant is blocked on glasswire, did you check my previous post screenshot from resource monitor?

 

[bill001g]

Well the second time I read your post I noticed that and updated my post at the same time you put in your last response. Sorry not doing so well reading things thoroughly today.

 

[gamingdepression]

Well the second time I read your post I noticed that and updated my post at the same time you put in your last response. Sorry not doing so well reading things thoroughly today.

All good, man! It was the upload speed, good guess, I'm on some hybrid now, no spikes, ping is stable around 48, not perfect, but stable! STABILITY IS KEY


Thank you for trying to solve, but good guess when you noticed I wrote my upload in OP haha

 

[Vincent007]

internet speed:
download 20mbps
upload 0.4-0.5 mbps
hello, on the official pingplotter forum i didn't get support, well in the first results i did, but im confused, first i showed them these screenshots:

https://imgur.com/rRP53GJ

View: https://imgur.com/rRP53GJ

https://imgur.com/xsTgeDC

View: https://imgur.com/xsTgeDC



they said nothing here looks like the experience (ping/latency/packet burst spikes) im having in warzone, meanwhile in valorant my game ping also jumps to around 1000ms almost every 20 seconds, it's crazy, i read their instructions, everything on these screenshots signals a problem based on that, if im wrong, tell me, it's okay to be wrong

so after a pause i had i decided to do some more tests because my isp told me "everything is good, ping good, speed good, but there are flaws in the installations in your building which you need to take care of yourself"

posted those screens on pingplotter, but no reply from them for a long time, im stressed about this so hopefully i can get some help here until my isp tells me more details (cause based on these next results it doesn't seem like the isp is at fault)

https://imgur.com/v5xA3yQ

View: https://imgur.com/v5xA3yQ

https://imgur.com/jKi9ZAj

View: https://imgur.com/jKi9ZAj






obviously showing latency spikes starting from the router/my pc/eth cable that continue to the final hop (according to pingplotter instructions that's an issue that starts with router/cable/pc if the problem occurs at the final hop aswell)

maybe these latency spikes are not the actual problem? maybe the router doesn't like when i "ddos" it every 1 second lol tell me please

wanna know what's weird?

when i play valorant and have cmd opened running "ping -t 8.8.8.8" and when i get a ping spike it shows a spike in cmd also, but when i trace the same target 8.8.8.8 in pingplotter and play a game of valorant and get a ping spike it doesn't show it in pingplotter

??????????????????

also bufferbloat results from dslreports are horrible, sometimes f grade even:

results

please help me get to the bottom of this, i am a very competitive gamer and this is making me pretty depressed, the little time i lately have and can't spend it on video games is horrible (hence the username)

things i tried:

router reset
checking for viruses using malwarebytes after i scanned with windows defender as usual
everything is up to date
brand new windows 10 installation
new router

How to Remove Hidden/Ghost Network Adapters in Windows? | Windows OS Hub (woshub.com)

First of all, do the following things listed here. Use the Powershell command that deletes all hidden drivers, and remove those bunk old registry entries there. Also, remove all old services from old cards to. Maybe even reinstall windows, although you don’t have to. Even that wouldn’t delete those powershell drivers.

Go into your device manager settings and set it up to AC for 5ghz, or AX or whatever it is for 6ghz. Depending on where you live, changing your static DNS server can help to, but if you live in the US, Canada or that kind of place and have a decent ISP, that’s probably not gonna do anything for you. Turn off the 2.4GHZ VHT mode, and if you have preferred network, make it 5G or 6G. Make it so the device can’t turn itself off to save power, in both device manager settings, and power settings (as well as the USB/PCI to). Go to your settings, network and internet, VPN, and uncheck the 2 boxes “allow VPN on roaming” and “allow VPN over metered networks”. The last thing to do is either disable windows update, or go into it’s settings and make it so the bandwidth is manually set to not be able to use more than 10%. This will make it basically impossible for it to bug your internet out.

One more thing, delete Ccleaner. I’ve heard bad things in regards to ping spikes. It has some process that always runs no matter what you do. Get some other registry cleaner, or even just manually do your registry, although it can be kinda annoying really. Using a fast registry cleaner wouldn’t even be able to get rid of those entries above though, because it doesn’t see them as any threat, just drivers that can be used when you replug in that other thing.

I play on a Netgear Nighthawk 1900 wifi and at first it kinda sucked, but after this stuff, it’s awesome. It never lags unless either multiple people are online, or my ISP itself is buggered out. Even when it does lag, it only gets a little choppy, like 200ms kinda lags. Never had it overheat either personally. This is a guide for wifi, for wired there are also similar things you could do to improve your connection. Also could go into your modem settings and set yours to highest priority, or get a dedicated gaming router. WHat's my download latency, or bloat like, it's very small, not to far off from wired. I see it like 9-12MS steady usually download latency. I don't even have a router, and the setting is high priority for my computer, but I don't have control over it. Just is nice from my modem. If I did get the matching fancy router to go with this, I probably could do some DNS <Mod Edit> that makes the servers in games give me lower ping. That's how you see these people running around with like 4-8 ping n <Mod Edit>, but eh.