[SOLVED] Random ping spikes on ethernet

[Exaillius]

Hi, I've been searching for the past two weeks on why my computer has been having random ping spikes, I've looked at a ton of threads here that had similar problems but they didn't help.

Whenever I chat on Discord with friends, I can hear everyone fine but my ping will spike to 5000 and I can't talk during the time, but like I said, I can hear my friends still. Same thing happens for games, I can play fine for maybe 3 minutes then it'll lag out and I'll be teleporting or I'll get disconnected from the game.

I decided maybe the modem router combo I have is faulty due to it having an Intel Puma Chip because I read that this could've been the cause, so I switched to a new modem router combo that doesn't contain it and the problem is still occurring. I've read it's possibly because of buffering but I'm not aware how one could fix that. The modem/router I'm currently using is a Motorola MG7315.

I've tried the usual stuff; disconnecting the modem, resetting it/rebooting it, tried different ethernet cords (this is happening on three different computers), tried talking to my ISP about it which is why I bought a new modem. Note that this hasn't ever happened until only recently. So, if anyone can help, that'd be great.

 

[bill001g]

The puma problem was fixed long ago and the problem was never ping spikes like you talk about it caused lag in games.

Your first test is to run a ping command to the router IP. This will eliminate the pc and/or the router as the cause. Since it is multiple pc it is much more likely it is not your equipment but you want to test to rule it out.

Next leave a constant ping run to some common IP like 8.8.8.8. This is a google dns server that is duplicated in many places an you seldom see even small spikes. This will tell you if there is some problem likely in your ISP. Testing to discord or games is more complex because there are many more ISP in the path.

If you see issues here the next step it to ping the ISP first router. If you do tracert to 8.8.8.8 it should be hop 2 in most cases. You can then run a constant ping to that IP.

In general ping spikes are being caused by data being held in a data buffer. This is very different than data being lost because of data errors. Most times the only reason a packet would be delayed is because of a overloaded connection. Be very sure you are not exceeding your upload or download rates you purchase from the ISP.

 

[Exaillius]

Pinging the router IP seemed fine.

I pinged to Google's DNS and for the most part, it's been fine with the highest being 165 ms, it also occasionally says "Request timed out". It used to be worse a week ago where it would spike up to over 1000 but its stopped doing that since two days ago. I went ahead and did tracert to 8.8.8.8 where it was fine but it timed out four times on line 7, 8 and 9 then said "Trace complete".

I went ahead and did tracert to a League of Legends NA server and it went fine for the first 6 lines but now it keeps saying Request timed out since. Not sure if that helps explain anything though.

 

[bill001g]

Tracert does not run long enough to give you much useful information. It pretty much just gives you the IP of the routers in the path. You would then need to do ping commands to the various hops in the path to try to find the issue.

Constant timeouts to some hops means little it could be those routers are configured to not respond to ping/trace and many times they can limit how much they respond to prevent someone from trying denial of service attacks by sending lots of pings.

In some ways you prefer timeout errors to latency spikes. The ISP will be able to fix packet loss because it generally is related to something that is defective. Latency spikes means something is overloaded and will be much harder to fix.

In general it is very hard to get stuff fixed far away from your house. In some cases it can be another ISP. What I would now do is leave constant ping run to your router and to hop 2 ip in the trace. For most people this represent the connection between your house and the ISP. This is also the most common place you see errors and also the easiest to get the ISP to fix. It is almost always some issues with the wiring between your house and the ISP box when you see issues on hop 2. Not again you hope it is data loss. Latency on this hop tends to be over utilization of your internet connection. This most times is equipment in your house but since the connection between your house and the ISP is shared with your neighbors it can be their traffic. This is much less likely lately modern technology like cable modems and fiber boxes the shared network speed is many gigabits so it is hard to overload. I guess you could have a bunch of teenagers living near you all running torrents but it does not cause the issues like it did years ago.