Did you check your ping plotter? I'm not sure what those numbers mean for me right now.
Did you check your ping plotter? I'm not sure what those numbers mean for me right now.
internet speed download 20mbps upload 0.4-0.5 mbps hi, on the official pingplotter forum i didnt get support, well in the first results i did, but im confused, first i showed them these screenshots: https://imgur.com/rRP53GJ view: https://imgur.com/rRP53GJ https://imgur.com/xsTgeDC view: https://imgur.com/xsTgeDC they said nothing here looks like the experience (ping/latency/packet burst spikes) im having in warzone, meanwhile in valorant my game ping also jumps to around 1000ms almost every 20 seconds, it's crazy, i read their instructions, everything on these screenshots signals a problem based on that, if im wrong tell me its okay to be wrong so after a pause i had i decided to do some more tests because my isp told me "everything is good ping good speed good but there are flaws in the installations in your building which you need to take care of yourself" posted those screens on pingplotter but no reply from them for a long time im stressed about this so hopefully i can get some help here until my isp tells me more details (cause based on these next results it doesn't seem like the isp is at fault) https://imgur.com/v5xA3yQ view: https://imgur.com/jKi9ZAj obviously showing latency spikes starting from the router/my pc/eth cable that continue to the final hop (according to pingplotter instructions that's an issue that starts with router/cable/pc if the problem occurs at the final hop aswell) maybe these latency spikes are not the actual problem? maybe the router doesn't like when i "ddos" it every 1 second lol tell me please wanna know what's weird? when i play valorant and have cmd opened running "ping -t 8.8.8.8" and when i get a ping spike it shows a spike in cmd also but when i trace the same target 8.8.8.8 in pingplotter and play a game of valorant and get a ping spike it doesn't show it in pingplotter ??????????????? also bufferbloat results from dslreports are horrible sometimes f grade even: results please help me get to the bottom of this i am a very competitive gamer and this is making me pretty depressed the little time i lately have and can't spend it on video games is horrible (hence the username) things i tried: router reset checking for viruses using malwarebytes after i scanned with windows defender as usual everything is up to date brand new windows 10 installation new router
Sounds like you get a better idea of pingplotter than most other people here who just post traces. If the trace doesn't stop packets going to the next hop, you can skip reading everything else in that trace. Your example showing 100% packet loss proves nothing: obviously, if there were no traffic at all, nodes past it wouldn't get anything either. But you do see responses from other nodes. Routers often try to send game traffic instead of answering test traffic, and some have rules to stop bad attacks. In the end, your traces show everything looks fine.
In this case, you tested into a login server for World of Tanks, but when you actually play, you probably aren't even on that server. The real game server might be in a different data center. You can find its IP by watching the network tab while playing; you'll see pretty much constant traffic going there. I think you won't be able to test against that actual server anyway because it's often firewalled to stop denial-of-service attacks, and unless you know their inner workings, figuring out how they're set up is hard. Sometimes multiple servers share one IP but use different ports, so tools like pingplotter can't easily find them. Still, none of this matters much for your problem. You can only fix stuff inside your house or a little bit on your ISP side. The pings show the issue isn't in the game nodes themselves; you could do something about that.
What would you do if the real connection to multiple ISPs was broken? It's not like senior technicians understand it and would be able to fix it by talking to you. Level 1 guys know only about games, not how to handle network issues. They'd have to pay way more money for help. If you spend time reading about bufferbloat, you'll see that site is mostly garbage. You get bufferbloat when loading a connection sends all data into buffers instead of letting it go. Games actually prefer losing packets rather than wasting them in buffers because they want speed. So why is your internet running at 100%? If it isn't at full speed, data isn't going into the buffers. That site intentionally overloads connections to see how big their buffers are. What the site actually does for you is: IF you're running at 100% load and can't avoid that, use special QoS settings to reduce the bufferbloat. The test button checks if your QoS is working well. It's very hard to get it tuned just right. Unfortunately, people just click a test button and see "red bad" without understanding that it only matters if you're trying to exceed your bandwidth—that's the real problem, not whether data sits in buffers.
In the end, I suspect you don't actually have a network issue. Here are some things to check first: make sure no so-called "gamer" QoS software is running. This comes bundled with motherboards and graphics cards sometimes. A common name for it is CFOSpeed. Any such software needs to be removed because it can fix nothing outside your machine, and if you have network overload inside your own computer, that's a bigger issue than silly software could solve. That program causes all kinds of weird problems instead. I would also check the network driver on your PC. Make sure Windows didn't install a generic one. Drivers from Microsoft for 2.5G ports were very unreliable when they first came out. After this, you start to suspect the game is lying.
What can happen is: the game tells you it's stuck rendering an image, then when it tries to get back your ping response, it blames the network delay instead of saying "no, I'm too busy." That's why people say they fixed these fake network problems by changing video settings, which makes no sense because video doesn't actually go over the internet.
Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful response. I learned a lot, but you left me confused, my pingplotter shows latency lately, no packet loss, latency. To be fair this DOES NOT happen when my game ping spikes. And you say there are no network issues, but my game ping spikes and my character rubberbands, sometimes packet loss is involved, but rarely. Do you see why this is confusing? No such gamer software btw haha, I know those things and tweaks are bs, running latest ethernet from the mbo drivers page. So if all my traces show no issues and I constantly get ingame lag it's my pc? Btw my pc does feel a bit unresponsive, like it has input lag, especially when typing, but all benchmarks, temps etc are fine, xmp enabled
I don't notice a problem with lag in your pingplot graph. First, games aren't always good at guessing how fast things go because they can't handle bad connections well. Think about it: if the server sends data but that data is too slow to arrive, the game gets confused and moves the player to the wrong spot on the screen. If the time for sending data changes a lot, the position of the player becomes very uncertain. You usually see a delay between 50 and 60 milliseconds when you log in.
The only thing that looks weird in your graph is sometimes hop 2 doesn't even send a message at all, yet the other hops take more than 30 milliseconds. It feels like most of the time is stuck on hop 2, which takes just a tiny bit longer to reach Google's DNS server (probably right here near you). Most people with fiber get under 3 millimeters delay between their house and the internet company. Cable systems are usually around 10 milliseconds. With DSL it can be worse but often they are also slow. This kind of feeling is very common if you use mobile broadband. Those connections sometimes have more delays, especially when many phones go in and out of the tower at once, causing random spikes in delay or even lost packets. It's like having a VPN on your router; that hides the real path from your house to the internet center (hop 2). You should be careful not to focus too much on just one spot because gamers often blame their network for everything, even when it is actually just the computer settings causing trouble.
It might be because games are wrong about what is really breaking things. They sometimes blame the game itself when a server gets too busy with new players, like during a big launch party. Gamers tend to ignore warning signs from power supply monitors and trust their own eyes over official tests more than they should. If you had ten different testing tools and nine said everything was fine but one said there was a problem, most people would know the real issue is that one tool, not all of them. For some reason, gamers always think it's in the game itself instead of checking if their network or PC has a bug.
If the problem is actually with your internet connection, figuring out why matters more than just changing things right now. The obvious difference between how tools test and how games work is where they are testing from; sometimes games don't even use the ping command to measure actual speed but instead look at live data directly. You can see something similar if you check the Resource Manager on your computer, specifically in the open sessions tab. It shows exactly how fast it takes to load websites like yours. This tool doesn't work inside most games because they send data using UDP instead of TCP, which means those tools cannot measure delay correctly.
There is a big problem here: you are now dealing with very detailed stuff that is probably impossible to fix easily. You only have control over your PC, your router, and maybe a little bit about the connection your ISP provides between your house and theirs. Nothing further than hop 2 in the trace... there is nothing else for you to change about. You would be wasting time if say Google had a bad router inside their network; it is not like you could simply drive over to that location and replace it yourself.
The most likely cause is some strange setting on your computer. It probably isn't really a network problem though. If you have multiple monitors, try leaving a constant ping running in a command window while testing various IP addresses, especially your own router, and see if the game detects an issue there. You could also run other monitoring tools on the second screen; simple Resource Manager is a good one since it shows spikes in CPU, memory, and disk usage. I mean you could try turning all video settings down to the lowest possible level and see if that changes anything. A game sends the exact same amount of data regardless of how you display it.
Thanks so much for your long answer, but you're still making me confused. Can you tell me why getting stuck at about 200ms isn't stopping me from playing? The first and last stops are both at that speed, but it's not steady all the time. I'm a gamer who keeps everything set to low settings for the game. Basically, if my computer says "ping" to 8.8.8.8 shows a jump when I see one while gaming, it means either the internet or the PC is causing it. The spike only happens when I play, not just when I check online sites alone. It feels like a silly question, but I'm really stuck on this and need help lol
You need to be careful if you make random mistakes with these tools. Sometimes it might just be a glitch on the test side, and nothing is wrong actually. Even small problems like losing one packet or having some delays here and there are usually not seen in real life. It becomes clear when you start getting about 1% of packets lost. The first-step delays can be much worse because they only happen if your router's processor is busy or if your PC's processor isn't reading the response fast enough. Network cables and ports themselves cannot cause these delays. This suggests there is a real bottleneck on your computer, like memory running low, the GPU getting too hot, or the CPU hitting its speed limit. There are way too many variables involved here. A true network problem wouldn't look exactly like the results you posted.
I don't get packet loss. That's very rare. In games, the ping goes up or latency spikes (whatever they call it). The command line says high millisecond jumps. Edit: Thanks. I will try more testing now with afterburner. edit2: What am REALLY interested in is if I have no ping spikes on cmd but get ping spikes when playing in-game. Are you sure it could be the PC? 0.5 upload is enough for games, right? I saw a lot of recommendations online for higher uploads, but netduma on youtube clearly tested and explained that games don't need good upload or download. They only need a stable connection and low ping. Even they showed results where games used like 100kbps upload too. I saw you mention in another thread something about 2.5g ports being bad. I have a b450 tomahawk max, it has a realtek 8111h adapter. Just throwing it out there. Maybe you know if that causes issues sometimes? Thanks sorry. I just want to be mega sure <3
I missed seeing you moving at such a slow speed before. That kind of connection is really rare today. If you go over that tiny upload limit, your internet will get very laggy. Your computer or other stuff in the house can probably send data to the router much faster than it sends it out on the internet line. This puts too much pressure on the buffer instead of letting data through quickly. The exact speed needed changes a lot depending on the game. Back when dialup was common, we didn't need very much bandwidth. Most games try to use as little as possible so you don't have to pay more than necessary. If they wanted 1gbit, there would be too many customers wanting that connection. I haven't checked all the specific rates for games in years, but most were well under 500kbps back then. I did see some talk about a game needing almost 1 mbit, though I paid little attention to it. When you have such a small internet connection, you really need to be careful. Even simple tests like ping can affect things. You want to make sure your computer is the only thing on your network and that all other windows are closed. Things like web browsers often send tiny requests just to update ads even if you aren't using a page yet. Another worry is using third-party voice apps like Discord. I should check the resource monitor to see exactly how much data my pc uses on the network to know if I'm close to the limit. You are looking for some program that isn't actually being used by your game or maybe the game is trying to use too much. It's possible your router can track usage, but this only matters if you have many devices connected. Adding a few extra apps to that tiny upload rate can cause big problems very quickly. A modern web page has a huge number of small URL requests being sent all at once, and even though each request is small, they can spike the connection on a very weak line.
I noticed my game was lagging when I used Discord voice chat. hmmm, let me check this right now. The funny thing is, my ISP never said something like "your upload sucks nothing we can do about it." View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDUJF7LZYxQ View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTEFJcEPGk8 This video made me think my internet speed isn't the problem. It says Call of Duty Bo3 uses about 60 kbit/s, which is only 0.06 Mbit—way slower than my upload speed anyway. Even though other stuff like gaming mixed with streaming makes things laggy on a slow connection, don't worry lol; everything got turned off when I was playing Valorant this video shows my network graph while I'm gaming https://prnt.sc/7OWO4E17MGmD Sometimes I feel it sometimes I don't. The network io number goes from around 100k to 2-3 million, usually sitting between 200-400k and is that the graph showing upload or download?
Because I've been online for years and have never checked what new games ask, I wouldn't just trust random YouTube videos. You don't actually need very high speed; most internet connections are already fast enough with 10mbit uploads, but only a tiny fraction has less than that. You should check the specific game you're playing. There are tools like hwinfo64 that record network usage to a file, though they're mainly for checking CPU cores and it's a bit complicated and free anyway. If you have just one screen left, leaving the Network tab open on a second monitor is probably fine. I think this will work even if you only use one display. But these numbers are average and might hide a sudden spike in speed depending on how they're calculated. This gets really tricky because it depends entirely on what you measure. Technically, your port stays at full speed (1gbit) or zero speed (0gbit) all the time, but those numbers mean nothing without context.