Lots of weird internet connection issues happening lately
Lots of weird internet connection issues happening lately
Hi everyone! I've been playing Overwatch and using Discord for about a month without any trouble, but this Monday was different. Starting around that time, I got HUGE ping in almost all games I play. Usually, the high latency only starts when I join a game or hang up. If I just stopped there, I would think it was the network or a bug from Overwatch, but the problem started on Discord calls too. About 10 to 20 minutes after starting a call, my ping jumped way up and stayed that way until I hung up and went back online. On Discord calls, other people's voices sound clear while I can only hear faint robot sounds from my friends. The spike happens separately in both games and Discord; they never happen together at the same time. My internet speed has never changed because I've tested it many times. I tried restarting my computer, updating Windows to the newest version, changing the ethernet cable, switching networks, reinstalling Discord, and even building a new laptop (which is about 2 years old) with an AMD Ryzen processor and NVIDIA graphics card but no router yet. Thanks for your time and help!
Did you try using a wire to connect to your router? It's not great if you want things done quickly with WiFi.
This sounds like a problem with the software on the machine, but you should check if another device can get online easily when this one is broken. You could also try opening just the CMD window in that first machine and running a ping to 8.8.8.8 all the time. If it works fine then it's probably some weird software glitch right now. Sometimes software makes the ping command act wrong but that happens rarely. In games, people often use ping names instead of the real command to measure how fast things happen because they include extra delay from the game itself. Your problem is very strange. It would not be normal to get random data disappearing all the time or at least starting halfway through your game and right after you started it. Usually a high ping means that data is waiting in a buffer, which is different from losing data caused by bad equipment. So if your internet gets too busy for example when you download a big game either while the computer is running it or on another machine, then your game data might sit in a queue waiting to start getting played out at the same time as the download. That's more likely if you only have a small connection but even that should not depend on exactly when the game starts for you. For example Microsoft updates run whenever they want but they don't care about when you started playing your game. The other one is harder to find and it means there is some bottleneck inside the machine itself. Something could be using too much CPU power and then all the data sits in the network buffer waiting, but the computer doesn't read it until it finishes reading that part of the system. These things are hard to spot often people change video driver settings just to fix ping times even though the internet and video data are completely separate from each other. That won't help if there is no problem with Discord calls at all.
Thanks for your answer and clearing up some things! It is indeed a strange problem, even though I recently tried flushing the DNS (which this site recommends: https://itechhacks.com/fix-overwatch-2-high-ping-issue/). I don't know if that will fully help, but I will follow what you say and try opening CMD to compare ping. Since flushing, I have not seen any pingspikes, and with some luck, it should stay that way. However, if bad luck continues, I might need to keep investigating further.