Lag Spikes Only in Online Games (CS:GO, League of Legends)

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
I

imixture

Reputable
Apr 5, 2014
2
0
4,510
When my internet is under heavy usage (family home and eating it up) I would get constant lag spikes in online games only. Other Things like streaming 1080p video on twitch, loading up 4k youtube videos, and even downloads are not interrupted in the slightest.
When my family isn't home however online gaming is fine. I would assume it was a problem with our internet speed, but it seems to be more than adequate to handle the loads.
I used to be able to play without any interruptions but out of no where (no change to our ISP, plan, or modem) the problem has surfaced. Speed test results do not change under load or under no load at all:
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
B

bill001g

Titan
Aug 9, 2012
28,367
2,766
125,640
I am going to bet you are playing your games on a wireless connection. Games more than anything else require consistent delays between the packets, this is used to sync the timing between the server and the client.

The method for sharing wireless connection does not do a great job since it is pretty much left up to the end machines to fight it out. It does not take a lot of wireless traffic from vairous machines to cause packet errors and retransmissions. All this takes time which causes random delays in the data. Most application the delay is so small you do not see it but since games are a real time thing they see even the slightest issue.

To see this you need to look for tools that measure jitter but ones that run from the internet tend to not always detect the issues correctly. To really test it you would have to set up some form of set server in your house you could test your end machines against.

If you are on a wired connection then I have no clue it could be a jitter issue even there but normally you would see the speed test impacted also.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
K

Kewlx25

Distinguished
Oct 23, 2009
2,275
0
20,160
In addition to bill001g, the real issue is your lack of bandwidth or stable bandwidth. There are only 3 solutions.
1) Get people to stop using so much bandwidth. Good luck
2) Purchase more bandwidth. Also, good luck
3) Traffic shape

#3 is probably you best bet. There are some "gaming routers" that claim to identify and prioritize gaming traffic. I have no idea how well these work. The simplest solution that I can think of is something like PFSense, where you setup traffic shaping to evenly distribution the bandwidth.

The "best" way would be to use HFSC and configure how you want different types of traffic to be their bandwidth split up, but it is considered an advanced subject. Works great for me, but took me a month to figure it out. Now it seems simple, but going into it there was little explanation of what was really happening.

OpenWRT may be a good alternative if you have a router that supports it. It supports Codel, which is an excellent AQM(Active Queue Management), which reduces buffer bloat.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
R

richb-hanover

Distinguished
Dec 21, 2013
34
1
18,540
I don't know if your question is still outstanding, but I'm going to second kewlx25's response and say that you may need some kind of traffic shaping. But first check the DSLReports Speed Test at http://dslreports.com/speedtest It measures latency/lag *during* the downloads and uploads.

I will wager that your router is "bufferbloated", and that the speed test shows high latency when others are using the router.

OpenWrt (if you're willing to make the effort) would definitely solve the bufferbloat problem. A couple references:

* What is Bufferbloat? http://richb-hanover.com/bufferbloat-and-the-ski-shop/
* Installing OpenWrt: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/installopenwrt
* Installing the SQM/fq_codel to solve bufferbloat:http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/sqm
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom