Question How can I stop my connection from being slow sometimes?
Question How can I stop my connection from being slow sometimes?
When I try to ping google.com with my computer, there is no packet loss at all. When I run a command like "ping -n 100 8.8.8.8" in my terminal, it usually takes about 40 to 50 milliseconds every time. After running this ten times in a row, the time slowly goes up: 60ms, then 70ms, 80ms, 90ms, and so on until it hits 120ms. Then suddenly, right back down to 50ms again for about ten seconds before starting to go higher once more. The log shows numbers like this all over the place: 50, 50, 50, 50, 50... then sometimes it jumps up and down like this: 60, 80, 90, 100, 50, 50. The pattern keeps going back to normal.
I get tired often in many spots like video games when things get slow and then everything goes back to working fine.
In general you will not be able to detect 50ms of jitter in a game. The software tends to allow for variations of this size. You might see 100ms or 200ms of jitter. Next it depends on where the problem is. You can do nothing about anything outside your house. Latency tends to be pretty much a fixed value based on distance. Variations tend to be some overload condition. Data will be held in buffers rather than discarded if a connection is busy but the being placed in a buffer delays the data. Almost every application works better because of this, games would actually rather have the data discarded.....at least until too much data was discarded. Pretty standard tests. Run tracert 8.8.8.8. This will not likely show anything, the goal is to get the IP of the router in the path. Start with ping to hop 1 which is your router IP. You tend to never see ping spikes on this unless you are using wifi. If you do it is some kind of software issue with the pc or router. Next do the same to hop 2 which should be the ISP first router. A very common cause of latency spikes in this hop is if your internet is being over utilized. You need to check to be sure nothing is transfering large amounts of data at that time. If you have a larger internet connection it tend to be upload rates that have the issue since they are smaller. Be sure nothing in your house for example is backing up data to say cloud storage. If both hop 1 and hop 2 are good it is going to be very hard to get fixed. This would mean there was some kind of capacity issue between your ISP routers or even worse in another ISP router. Now this could also be something other than a network problem. If you machine would for example spike to 100% cpu load it also can cause delays.
Well, trying to ping google works fine, but games act differently and feel like you're offline all the time. If it takes 50-110 seconds to reach Google, that's actually worse than normal because games can spike up to 300-400 milliseconds just for a few moments. I checked my modem ten times in a row and got a steady 1 millisecond reply on the second test. I don't have any cloud backups or anything else sending data without asking. In the Task Manager, nothing was using my network at all. Thanks so much for explaining!
When you use a game to test your network, it can be very complicated. Too many settings for example cause poor frame rates and lag. You could set the resolution to 4k and everything to maximum, but that might make the game run slower. Many games try to blame the internet connection, even if you lower the video settings and suddenly things get better. The real video stream does not go over your network; the traffic stays the same no matter what resolution you choose. What actually happens is the game gets too busy processing videos like a video routing worker. When it finishes that job, it checks how long it took to ping something else and blames that extra time on your internet, even though the data was just sitting there waiting to be read. So you should use ping commands carefully to check things. The game server and the google server are in different places and might have different times because they travel over the internet differently. Even if you dig around looking for where the difference is comes, you can't change how your data travels or how ISP companies connect together. Generally speaking, it's better to spend time fixing actual problems than guessing about testing games. So I would still try hopping 2 and see what happens there. There is a chance that some software on your PC is causing this but it will be hard to tell if just the game is responsible or if it is something else like hardware or another program on Windows. Normally you would run linux from a USB boot image so you can know if it was strange hardware, windows, or other software issues. But most games won't work in linux even if they do and installing them to run on a USB drive takes too much time and could mess up your windows install anyway. You can of course use speedtest and ping with the default settings but if those tools don't show any problems then it usually isn't worth trying this way at all.