Ping Fluxuations

Ok my internet has been reset this month,
but when playing CSS my ping keeps fluxuating at some random points between 30 - 120

Any idea what this is or how i can fix it?
It was suggested I renew my IP addy, but not sure if that will do it...

Cheers

Originally Posted by Soul-Taker

Ok my internet has been reset this month

Reset.. in what way?

I can't really say anything but the obvious; just make sure you don't have any downloads/uploads going on when you play, turn off any torrent/downloading clients, etc. If you are using wireless internet, you could try moving the router closer to your PC.

Do you connect wirelessly? If so, I can help. I just spent a week solving wireless ping spike problems on Windows 7, I've tried pretty much every possible solution out there. One of them worked, trouble is I'm not quite sure which one...

As said let us know how you connect:

Wireless:

Random high ping responses (or Jitter as it's called - latency is the time it takes to respond and Jitter is the variance in latency) is common on wireless as the technology can suffer from packet less and latency, affected by other network interference, wireless phones, microwaves e.t.c.

Wired:

First try to determine where the latency is being introduced - most likely to be your ISP network, the cheap providers will over subscribe their borders so at peak times you are fighting with everyone else to get out of their network onto the internet - so for every 1Mb capacity at their edge it could shared between 2000+ users - for DSL via a BT reseller you will be either 20:1 contention or 50:1 - so shared the bandwidth from your DSLAM with up to 50 other people in your area,

As stated previously, check traffic on your local machine but also trace the issue to your local network or beyond

Could be speed/duplex issue, packet collision/retransmission on your LAN or issues on your DSL, or on your ISP network - it's a case of working out where the problem is first then tackling it

Start by firing up a command prompt and entering "ipconfig /all" - this will give you your internal IP address and gateway, then fire off a continuous ping to your default gateway (which will likely be your router)

Example below:

My PC IP address details:

Code:

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

        Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : xxxxx.co.uk
        Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ether
et
        Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-16-36-DC-17-6B
        Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
        Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
        IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.8.8.116
        Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
        Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.8.8.254
        DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.8.8.11
        DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.5.5.25
                                            10.1.1.31
        Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 10.5.5.25
        Secondary WINS Server . . . . . . : 10.8.8.10
        Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : 02 March 2010 12:56:38
        Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : 05 March 2010 12:56:38

So enter "ping 10.8.8.254 -t" in your command prompt

output as below - press "ctrl-c" to stop when you are finished - I usually leave several of these going at anytime when looking at latency/jitter issues so after this step fire up a new command prompt after running this:

Note that there is no latency or packet loss:

Code:

C:\>ping 10.8.8.254 -t

Pinging 10.8.8.254 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.8.8.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255

Ping statistics for 10.8.8.254:
    Packets: Sent = 9, Received = 9, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms
Control-C

Note that in this instance there is 0% loss and my min & max latency is 0ms (which it should be for a wired connection - expect around 10ms for a wireless network depending on signal/range)

If after running this for a while your ping response is steady then you need to move up the chain and send packets to something inside your ISP network - the ueasiest place to target next is to ping your ISP's DNS servers as these will typically be on the inside of your ISP network before going onto the public internet - from the command above we got our DNS server, if you are using your router for DNS and can't see the IP address then you can trace route to an internet host and look for the next network hop after your network,

Running a traceroute will allow you to see exactly where your traffic is going and any latency on the way

So an example is below - let's trace to www.bfb-online.com:

Code:

c:>tracert www.bfb-online.com

Tracing route to vbulletin.globalgold.co.uk [91.207.221.71]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  93.14.123.10
  2     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  ro-tchx-co1.ggg-isp.net [12.44.60.5]
  3     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  ro-tchx-co2.ggg-isp.net [22.44.60.6]
  4     7 ms     7 ms     7 ms  linx-gw1.rbsov.ncuk.net [195.66.224.240]
  5     7 ms     7 ms     7 ms  gi0-1-10-star1.bdr-rt1.thdo.ncuk.net [80.249.97

You can hit ctrl-c once you get a few responses - from here I can see that my next hop is 93.14.123.10

Then fire off a continuous ping to the next hop address - and check latency:

Code:

C:\>ping 93.14.123.10 -t

Pinging 93.14.123.10 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 103ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 20ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 26ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 80ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 24ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 250ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 25ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 25ms TTL=255
Reply from 93.14.123.10: bytes=32 time 25ms TTL=255

Ping statistics for 93.14.123.10:
    Packets: Sent = 9, Received = 9, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 20ms, Maximum = 250ms, Average = 124ms
Control-C

And there we are in my example - your latency is across your WAN connection - and as it's going up and down we can tell it's jitter - now if this is to the next hop address and your on ADSL it's likely to be the LNS or gateway router on the ISP's network that aggregates Broadband traffic - it's time to speak to your ISP and advise that you are seeing excessive latency, jitter, packetloss e.t.c

Hope the example above is helpful - let us know where the issue lies and then we can help with what to do next

Ok Im Currently wired into the modem, by reset I mean that I now have 75 gb a month download allowance, will try the rest in a bit.