Ping problem.

[Kabasares]

As of late, I have been playing with a ping of roughly 160-170. Before this, my average ping was around 115, but that, too seems pretty high for me. I know the server is located in New Jersey, and I'm all the way over in San Francisco, California, which is roughly 2500+ miles, but even the Euros appear to have a better ping than me on a good day, and they're more than 3000+ miles away from the server. The Euros' pings usually are around 100-110, while my best is usually 115. My connection speed is 54 Mbps. Any tips are appreciated!

[Elder]

yeah... lots a people have been complaining bout their ping. mine too has been going up.... sadly. Even though I Have Verizon DSL.

[Nathan]

Here's an interesting experiment: Go to speedtest.net and select a server in or near jersey and see what ping you get.

Mine for Jersey is:

Mine for Dallas, Texas (more local) is:

It looks like it is worse to Jersey, but my ping hasn't been that high.

They make it really easy to share those graphs as well which is nice.

[Cayen]

this is mine but its putting me at 100+ in the server or 60+ on good days

[Elder]

...

[Kabasares]

This is mine for a more local area

This is where I think the server is.

[Dillon 1st MRB]

Don't confuse ping with bandwidth. Also, remember that there is off-net and on-net. Were our servers hosted by Comcast, you'd have a ping around 110ms (for a coast-to-coast, almost diagonal geography). Now then, here is where it gets a bit murky for most people. Not all internet networks are created equally. For the US, the big Tier 1 players are Qwest/CenturyLink, AT&T (3 different legacy networks), and... well, that's about it for the Tier 1's. There used to be more but, there those two pretty much cover the country. Like most gamers, we are on cable internet and dsl (we won't get into the fiber options for this discussion). The good thing about cable is that it has tons of bandwidth potential. The bad thing about it is that your neighborhood trunk will rarely let you get your full bandwidth unless its off-peak. Even then, throttling occurs (this is where Net Neutrality figures in, but that's a whole other can of worms). And never believe the speed tests. Remember turbo boost? Yeah, every cable company does this so you feel good about your service.

Now then.... here's the bad news: ping is largely a function of geography. Because you are at the mercy of all the hops you take getting to New Jersey, it only takes a couple of laggy servers (by laggy, I mean 10ms delays) before you start to really notice. If you want to find out where the issue is, run a traceroute from your computer to the pub. Now, the really bad news... you can't do anything about it. We're all at the mercy of the servers along the way. Drop into the CLI and type tracert <address> and you'll get a nice little view of what's happening.

Back in the day, there was a service called game rail. I think it was for dsl or cable, but what it did was to reserve a certain pathway for you to game servers. There was a subscription involved, but I don't think they are in business anymore. For myself, I find that when I am through peak times for the Eastern time zone, my game gets far less latency.

[M. Duke]

I was going to suggest the same as Dillon.

The speed test doesn't mean a lot in this situation - a traceroute will determine what, if any, problems there are and likely show why you might have a bad ping.

To test it out:

1) click on start and type cmd in the search box - press enter. (ie, bring up your command window)

2) type "tracert 208.167.243.207" without the quotes and hit enter.

3) Post the results.

Mine looks like this:

Tracing route to 208.167.243.207.choopa.net [208.167.243.207]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1

2 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms 172.29.240.1

3 19 ms 32 ms 36 ms fp129.ips.PaulBunyan.net [205.149.159.129]

4 37 ms 55 ms 36 ms eae149.ips.PaulBunyan.net [209.191.222.149]

5 50 ms 49 ms 53 ms gige-g2-15.core1.chi1.he.net [216.66.77.129]

6 58 ms 65 ms 56 ms 10gigabitethernet7-2.core1.nyc4.he.net [72.52.92.177]

7 67 ms 61 ms 62 ms 10gigabitethernet1-2.core1.nyc1.he.net [72.52.92.46]

8 * * * Request timed out.

9 75 ms 73 ms 59 ms ve21-br2.ewr3.choopa.net [66.55.135.225]

10 88 ms 59 ms 78 ms tge1-2-cr2.ewr2.choopa.net [66.55.128.34]

11 60 ms 59 ms 59 ms 208.167.243.207.choopa.net [208.167.243.207]

Trace complete.

I usually get a ping in the 50s or 60s on the pub, so extrapolate from there based on your results.

[Kabasares]

Tracing route to 208.167.243.207.choopa.net [208.167.243.207]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 39 ms 93 ms 6 ms 192.168.0.1

2 57 ms 88 ms 52 ms c-76-103-8-1.hsd1.ca.comcast.net [76.103.8.1]

3 23 ms 91 ms 39 ms te-7-3-ur02.sfmission.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.87

.197.101]

4 19 ms 102 ms 101 ms te-1-10-0-3-ar01.oakland.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68

.85.154.50]

5 22 ms 53 ms 46 ms pos-2-2-0-0-cr01.sacramento.ca.ibone.comcast.net

[68.86.90.137]

6 57 ms 47 ms 63 ms pos-0-7-0-0-cr01.sanjose.ca.ibone.comcast.net [6

8.86.85.46]

7 25 ms 59 ms 108 ms pos-0-5-0-0-pe01.11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.ne

t [68.86.87.162]

8 130 ms 82 ms 46 ms 208.178.58.13

9 40 ms 30 ms 67 ms ae9-40G.scr4.SNV2.gblx.net [67.17.72.13]

10 175 ms 127 ms 102 ms te2-1-10G.asr1.EWR2.gblx.net [67.16.136.230]

11 176 ms 113 ms 142 ms xe-1-0-4.ar2.ewr1.us.nlayer.net [69.31.94.137]

12 104 ms 116 ms 123 ms as20473.ae3.ar2.ewr1.us.nlayer.net [69.31.34.214

]

13 111 ms 100 ms 100 ms tge2-4-cr2.ewr2.choopa.net [66.55.128.162]

14 212 ms 196 ms 216 ms 208.167.243.207.choopa.net [208.167.243.207]

Trace complete.

The bottom half doesn't look so promising.

[Dillon 1st MRB]

Hop 8 is where you start crossing the country.

[M. Duke]

Yep, I don't think there's a lot you're going to be able to do about it. Dillon's first post in this thread pretty much sums up your problem.

Too many hops over some bad servers.

Comcast is notoriously a shitty ISP in my experience. If you have other options you might check out the competition. If you have friends in your local area on different ISPs have them run the same tracert and see what kind of results they get.

[Lafy BAR]

Kaba, not sure if you're still having this problem, but hop 1 should NOT be

1 39 ms 93 ms 6 ms 192.168.0.1

That's awful. that should be 1ms 1ms 1ms or so. It looks like your router or network card is screwed up and is adding a bunch of latency.

Do you have another PC you can try rerunning the tracert from to figure out if it's the router or the pc?

What brand/model of router is it?

Have you tried a factory reset?