Unexplainable Ping Spikes

SebastienSam

Honorable
Jun 26, 2013
10
0
10,510
Hello everyone,

For a couple months now, I've been experiencing huge ping spikes while playing the online multiplayer game League of Legends. I always thought it was due to Internet problems (Netalyzr showed a huge upload buffer), until a few days ago, when I changed ISP and it solved my buffer problems, but not my lag spikes.

I am starting to suspect that my ping spikes aren't related to my network, but to other hardware problems within my computer, but I don't know if this is possible.

The symptoms are:
-While playing LoL, I get huge ping spikes at key moments in the game (when game elements spawn, during fights, when things get revealed through the fog of war).
-I check my ping via: cmd prompt -> "ping google.com -t". I let it run all the time. It is stable at 17-20 ms out of game and while surfing the net. Watching HD streams might make it rise to ~40 ms. Playing LoL creates sudden ping spikes from the usual 20 ms to over 1300 ms periodically throughout the game.
-I haven't played much DotA2, but I have gotten huge ping spikes in it too.

Now, the key thing is that I've been getting those ping spikes in single player LoL custom games too, but not while doing network intensive tasks like watching HD videos or uploading videos on Youtube (ping only goes up to ~200-300 ms when the network is getting stressed to its full potential).

My question is: is it possible that hardware failure other than my wireless LAN card can actually cause those ping spikes? For example, lag in the motherboard or the RAM or my graphics card is indirectly causing huge network ping spikes.

My computer is 2 years old, but has had a ton of problems in the past. It loads very slowly and behaves weirdly to certain things (like trying to launch files like setup.exe or various installers causes my file folder to stop responding and it doesn't launch the program. However, right clicking and choosing "run as administrator" works perfectly fine.). I have gotten many different BSODs in the past and recently too.

Any help is greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance!
 
Solution
when was the last time you did a full system check for virus spyware all the update a good temp and cookies files clean up after this a full drive defrag ?

SebastienSam

Honorable
Jun 26, 2013
10
0
10,510


Hey, thank you for your help :)

I've fully cleaned my computer from malwares about 2 weeks ago (when I had a very persistent virus, but it's gone now).

However, I haven't done a temp/cookie cleanup and full drive defrag ever. Do you think this is likely to be causing all the problems I have right now? I will do that if necessary, but I have a 12 years old cheap pentium 4 computer who has never failed me (despite my intense gaming) and I've never cleaned it up whatsoever.

Is CCleaner good enough for all these tasks? (and windows tool for defrag)
 

SebastienSam

Honorable
Jun 26, 2013
10
0
10,510

Thanks for your reply :)

I'm using Free Avast!. I will try to clean up my registry a few times (I've done it a couple times in these past weeks, but didn't know you had to do it several times in a row!)
 
get rid of avast, it is a system hog and slows your pc down, get avg free instead. you will immediatly see a performance improvement once you delete it and it will most likely cure your lag problem.

run ccleaner registry cleaner between uninstalling avast and installing avg.
 

SebastienSam

Honorable
Jun 26, 2013
10
0
10,510
Alright, I've fixed the registry and cleaned all the temps and cookies and tried again. It seems like the problem is still here.

I've also noticed that when I get the ping spikes (still from 20 ms to 1000+ ms and back to 20 ms immediately), my FPS doesn't drop, if that means anything.

I've removed the dust from my computer a month ago. I'll try installing AVG later, but I've only heard good things about Avast!, so I'm not sure if that's really a problem (according to the research I did two weeks ago after I cleaned up my whole computer from viruses).

Also, I am still wondering about my main question, which is if it's possible that a problem with my Graphics card, RAM or motherboard can cause such ping spikes. These components are very suspicious to me, as I've had various BSOD in the past week, but I want to be sure that they're actually causing my network problems instead of some networking issues specific to the games servers I play on.
 
honestly it most likely is Avast, it causes all sorts of system slowdowns and problems, just uninstall it to see, if it is not avast just put it back on again.

i have removed it from many peoples computers to solve many varying issues, it really can be an appalling piece of software.
 
Grab inssider and check how congested the local wireless networks are, change your wireless channel on your router to a less congested wireless channel it a few networks are on the same channel.

Only just noticed you also said you use wireless.
 

scout_03

Titan
Ambassador
i read back the post answer you had a virus that you clean up ,did you do a full scan without network connected and scan also the archive and the restore point there is a option in avast that you could made a scan at start up before windows load i would try this one in case .the other thing did you put all the settings as expert in avast to scan all container and in the p2p add u torrent on the scan box .