high latency in games (and in general)

[TerroH8er]

Ok.. first of all, I'm pretty much a networking newb so bear with me.

I've been having latency problems for the last week or so. From the start, I've been thinking it's on my ISP's end but they keep denying it. I called technical support and they said they couldn't do anything about it and hung up (no goodbyes mind you, i was pretty pissed). Anyway, I then e-mailed my ISP and I got a nice fellow from Maryland i think (my ISP is pretty much local to my town though) and he was explaining to me about how if I change between my router and modem it won't work because if there's more than 2 NAT devices (or something) detected within the lease period of a week, then it will purposely give low speeds and stuff I didn't understand. Anyway, that wasn't the case apparently. I'm using a Belkin router and a Surfboard 4200 modem.

These aren't really "spikes" but at certain times (I don't believe there's a pattern to the times, more random). If i type ping google.com in Run then it will give the same 300ms pings. I've tried resetting my modem and on a different computer. I've heard about using trace route but I'm not really sure how to interpret these results. I believe this might be the solution because I was playing with my friend who is from my town BUT he has a different ISP and he was getting similair pings. Could it possibly be a "hop" or whatever that is giving us bad pings? Or is it on my end?

Thanks for your help,
Kevin

BTW - my ISP is gmpexpress
Also, I was considering going with 1000/1000 instead of my 512/128 that I have now - would this help my average ping (not the bad pings but overall)?

[Respice]

Welcome to SG! :)

There are some things we'll need to know about your connection to see where the problem could be. 300ms is unacceptable to me especially for an east coast provider. You mentioned the trace route which is a very helpful tool. First follow this link which will take you to the speedguide.net TCP/IP Analyzer (TCP/IP is the protocol used for information to be transferred over the internet).

http://www.speedguide.net/analyzer.php

Copy and paste your results in this thread. Be sure to remove your IP address from the results.

Next, to do a trace route you can use several programs that do it for you, or you can do it from the command line. I prefer command line just because it's easier for me. To do this you must get to your MS DOS command prompt.

Click Start > Run
Then type: cmd

This will open the prompt.

at the C:\> Type:

tracert www.speedguide.net > trace.txt

You can substitute speedguide.net for any address. I like to do it to the IP addresses of game servers I play on to give me accurate results of where my ping suffers. You will not see anything on the screen. All your results will be put into the trace.txt file. When it is finished, open the text file and copy the results of the test here.

We will have a good understanding of your connection then.

[TerroH8er]

thanks for the welcome :)

MTU = 1500
MTU is fully optimized for broadband.
MSS = 1460
Maximum useful data in each packet = 1460, which equals MSS.

Default Receive Window (RWIN) = 256960
RWIN Scaling (RFC1323) = 2 bits
Unscaled Receive Window = 64240

RWIN is a multiple of MSS
Other values for RWIN that might work well with your current MTU/MSS:
513920 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 8)
128480 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 2)
64240 (MSS x 44)
bandwidth * delay product:

Your RcvWindow limits you to: 10278.4 kbps (1284.8 KBytes/s) @ 200ms
Your RcvWindow limits you to: 4111.36 kbps (513.92 KBytes/s) @ 500ms
MTU Discovery (RFC1191) = ON
Time to live left = 55 hops

TTL value is ok.
Timestamps (RFC1323) = OFF
Selective Acknowledgements (RFC2018) = ON
IP type of service field (RFC1349) = 00000000

that's from the analyzer

Tracing route to www.google.com [216.239.51.99]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1

2 11 ms 10 ms 11 ms cable1-98.berwick.gmpexpress.net [65.121.223.129]

3 247 ms 295 ms 282 ms dca-edge-06.inet.qwest.net [65.118.218.241]

4 209 ms 231 ms 261 ms dca-core-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.9.29]

5 326 ms 304 ms 262 ms dca-brdr-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.9.58]

6 266 ms 300 ms 279 ms p4-0.qwest.stngva01.us.bb.verio.net [205.171.14.46]

7 252 ms 249 ms 201 ms p16-0-1-0.r20.asbnva01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.75]

8 302 ms 343 ms 337 ms p16-5-0-0.r01.asbnva01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.61]

9 283 ms 270 ms 245 ms ge-1-2.a00.asbnva01.us.ra.verio.net [129.250.26.113]

10 248 ms 289 ms 295 ms ge-3-2.a00.asbnva01.us.ce.verio.net [168.143.105.58]

11 277 ms 243 ms 294 ms 216.239.47.102

12 290 ms 249 ms 215 ms 216.239.51.99



Trace complete.


for some reason, I think I remember that yesterday the results were like.. the pings were 10-40 up until the 6th one, where it got pretty bad.

btw this is during a "bad" time, it started a couple of minutes in the middle of CS. it's getting rediculous because they try to blame it on everything being "busy" but pings shouldn't go up to 300ms for most of the day.

thanks again!

[TerroH8er]

it just got good again so I did another tracert in case it's helpful.



Tracing route to google.com [216.239.51.100]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1

2 41 ms 39 ms 14 ms cable1-98.berwick.gmpexpress.net [65.121.223.129]

3 95 ms 78 ms 51 ms dca-edge-06.inet.qwest.net [65.118.218.241]

4 54 ms 64 ms 85 ms dca-core-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.9.29]

5 46 ms 41 ms 31 ms dca-brdr-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.9.58]

6 56 ms 41 ms 62 ms p4-0.qwest.stngva01.us.bb.verio.net [205.171.14.46]

7 60 ms 49 ms 44 ms p16-0-1-0.r20.asbnva01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.75]

8 50 ms 38 ms 39 ms p16-5-0-0.r01.asbnva01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.61]

9 65 ms 62 ms 61 ms ge-1-2.a00.asbnva01.us.ra.verio.net [129.250.26.113]

10 53 ms 93 ms 107 ms ge-3-2.a00.asbnva01.us.ce.verio.net [168.143.105.58]

11 46 ms 58 ms 54 ms 216.239.47.102

12 59 ms 48 ms 36 ms www.google.com [216.239.51.100]



Trace complete.


would this mean that the problem is not on my end since my ping to my ISP is good even during the bad times? they keep trying to say that it's on my end but I don't really think so.

[mnosteele52]

It looks like the problem is with your ISP, I would call and complain. In any case you should lower your RWIN, it is too large for your connection. It won't help your latency but it will help your overall speed.

:) :D

[TerroH8er]

i did complain, they said they couldn't do anything. I'll be calling tomorrow with the traceroute results

[TerroH8er]

oops i never got to call but im going on vacation for 3 weeks, and if it's not fixed by then, then i'll be super mad :mad: isn't there something to do if i ask them for help and they say "no" like they did last time?

any more suggestions?