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.
Flushing DNS won't do anything. DNS just turns website names into IP addresses so your computer can talk to them. Once that happens, the job is done. Sometimes IPs or names change when you start a new session, but most games don't need that stuff at all. Your game connects directly to its servers using only the list of servers in-game; it sends the server's real IP straight away without needing DNS. That flushing trick is much more useful for websites where an IP address might have changed recently. Most modern web servers aren't just one single machine sitting in one place—they're all virtual, so there are lots of ways to handle names and things like that. Basically, this doesn't really matter for games or even Discord because they keep their connections open anyway and choose IPs on their own without touching DNS at all.
I was right about flushing DNS because it didn't help me today. This evening I tried playing Overwatch again and using Discord, so I asked for a ping check using CMD on my second laptop and compared its results with Discord and Overwatch. There were no issues found either way. When I used Discord this evening though, the pings spiked only for 1 to 3 minutes at first. The rate of these spikes is still once every 10 to 20 minutes. I also noticed that when joining an Overwatch game with high ping, the connection stays slow throughout the whole game. But if I leave and come back, everything works fine again. Any ideas?
Here are the problems I hate the most. It's not really about networks, it's mostly some stupid Windows stuff. Microsoft has way too much junk in the operating system and you can never be sure there isn't some weird setting you missed. One thing that causes so many strange issues is this crapware that comes with motherboards or video cards. These programs try to say they lower game latency or lag, but they really don't change traffic outside of your computer, which is just silly. Hopefully, you are not downloading torrents while you play games because those downloads can slow things down. You should uninstall anything like CFOSpeed if it speeds up one type of traffic over another. Discord is a pretty simple program. Do you get trouble with discord just running that without any game running? Games are different though. Sometimes video driver issues or settings can cause delays in your games. Or maybe the resource monitor will give you a clue if something is being overloaded.
Regular Windows is full of junk programs. Just by reinstalling it a month ago, using ThisIsWin11 from GitHub helped. When gaming right now, I don't download torrents. If I just use Discord without any games, the ping spikes stay normal. I tried some games with Resource Monitor on, but nothing special came up. It's like during the day where my spikes are lower than at night (especially when playing Overwatch).
The torrent download comment was pretty clear: it would take a really stupid person to need a tool like CF Speed. That kind of program is very easy to get installed by accident. For example, almost every Asus board bundles this program along with the drivers and other tools you install. If you are not careful to exclude it when setting those up, it will just add another one automatically. You might be wrong about what's causing the problem here; I don't know for sure where the real issue lies. The big difference is that the ping command works fine, but this program doesn't. I have no idea how that can happen, though ping isn't supposed to use the same protocols as other apps just sending and receiving data—that would be weird. Maybe you should try digging through the Network tab in your Resource Monitor and see if there are high latency numbers matching the IPs of Discord or the game. It might not show anything interesting at first, but many games don't use TCP for their sessions, so these tools only display latency for TCP traffic.