Question Unbearable lag and ping in games.

[louism481]

Hello. I have a problem where my download speed is slower than usual, but more or less normal. However when im playing games my ping is 120ms+ and im lagging alot, it makes competitive games incredibly hard to play, lagging about the place and sometimes i cant move etc. When i run a wifi speed test (i use ethernet connection via a powerline adaptor) it says my ping is low, around 20, but the download speed is 10-30 Mbps. I am on virgin media wifi and paying for 200Mbps. On their website is says there are no issues with broadband in my area (SW London) or with my hub, and many friends who i have spoken to also on virgin media in my area are experiencing no problems what so ever. I have tried resetting my hub already and it did nothing. Can anyone provide some suggestions to what i should be doing?

Here are some of the speed tests I did:

 

[bill001g]

You need to do a test plugged directly into the router with ethernet.

Not sure what you mean by "virgin media WIFI". Does the internet come into your house via some kind of wire or are you using wireless.

 

[louism481]

Virgin media is my internet provider and it comes into my house via a wire which is plugged into our router.
the reason for using the powerline adaptor is that my pc is in another room to where the router is so doing a speed test plugged into there wont be possible. however the computer that is in that room is plugged directly into the router and is only marginally better, as far as gaming on is goes i cant tell you because its a mac and there are no games on it.

 

[Countgreen]

I would scrap the powerline adapters of I were you. There are a lot of issues with it and as the wire/ house pages there can be more problems. Run a ethernet cable if you can or use wifi. 2.4ghz will go through walls better but 5ghz will be faster.
It may be a carrier issue. Call them and ask them to check everything on their end.

 

[louism481]

How would i run an ethernet cable through the different rooms?
also I built my pc and it does not have wireless capabilities. Besides, surely wired connection is far better.
I tried to contact my supplier but they have not responded most likely due to current affairs, but according to the site there is no problem with my hub or my area.

 

[bill001g]

Even if you move your pc and put it on the floor near the router it will help.

Your problem is you do not know if it is the powerline units or the internet or maybe something with the game maybe. There is a massive amount of stuff that can cause this and you can get very side tracked chasing something that is not actually the cause.

 

[louism481]

I know its not the powerline unit because all the other devices/places in the house experience the same issues with low speeds

 

[kerberos_20]

well then
open command line with admin rights (window key, type cmd, right click -> run as admin)
type:
tracert www.google.com

post your result, it should be visible if issue lies within your connection or its isp issue

 

[louism481]

I ran it twice for good measure.

 

[bill001g]

It shows nothing is wrong but it means very little if the problem is random. You have to be lucky to run it when it happens and even then you may get inconsistent results.

The problem maybe load related. Try to do something like download a file on something like steam that you can set the download rates. Set it to something very low say 1MB/sec. This should be a 8mbit download rate well below your maximum. If this is causing issues you should see extended ping in tracert and ping commands. You have to be careful to not download too fast since it always causes delays if you were to hit 100% utilization.

It could also be the upload bandwidth but that is much harder to test. You need someway to send a file at a very restricted rate. A number of services offer small amounts of free cloud storage. You want to use a service you can set the upload rate. In this case it needs to be much smaller than even 1MB.

If non of this shows a issue you start to suspect it is some issue in the internet that only certain locations are being affected. This is very hard to say you must test until you find something that gives you a clue.

 

[louism481]

Ok, so i downloaded an update at 1MB/s then ran the cmd thing, heres what i got.

 

[bill001g]

You still show no issues. This maybe that you have no problems getting to google but issues getting to other locations. This appears to be much more complex than some problem with your PC or a simple problem with your internet connection.

Maybe tracert to other location will show something.

What you have so far says there is no problem with your connection.

 

[louism481]

Ok i gave it some time and its more or less the same, if not worse. the download speeds are fine but in every game i play i lag so much i often cant move, having ping of 100+ that spikes to about 200ms.
I dont know anything about all theses tracert things are but if they showed nothing then i have no idea whats going on.

 

[bill001g]

The problem is I can do nothing with the information you have provided. I am not saying it is not happening I just have no way to troubleshoot this myself and I can only rely on what you post.

This unfortunately means you are going to have to learn a lot more than the average person that asks these questions.

It may not even be a network problem some games lie when there are issue with say a video driver. You do not want to pursue that though until you are sure there is no network issue.

You first test will be to try to confirm that what the game is telling you is the truth. Try leaving a constant ping command to the server ip of the game run in a background cmd window. Some games unfortunately do not respond to ping so you may have to use the tracert to find some hop in the path to the game server that does respond.

When you see issues in the game you want to tab over and see if the ping window shows anything unusual.

If it does then you try the same thing to other hops in the trace working back toward hop1. You could skip to hop 1 and hop 2 immediately if you want since those really are the only somewhat easy ones to fix.

 

[louism481]

Ok so i dont know if it will help but now the download speed is also very slow as is loading web pages. maybe this will change the problem?