Getting 100+ms ping spikes to router on wired connection

Rohrzk

Honorable
Nov 18, 2016
9
0
10,510
Hello, I play alot of Heroes of the Storm (or used to). Recently my husband and I have started getting lag spikes where our ping will go up to 100-200ms which is pretty noticable in that type of game. I posted on the game forums first and they asked me to use WinMTR to monitor the connection and pointed out that the issue is starting as early as my 1st/2nd hops. They told me to go to my ISP but I wanted to post here first because I hate the hoops you go through with ISP sending tech's out and not finding anything or not thinking 100ms is a big deal.

Below is the troubleshooting I've done so far:
Restarted router
Updated network drivers and all other PC drivers
Turned off router firewall and made sure PC firewall whitelisted our game
Checked cables from PCs to router

Below is all the information I can think of that would be helpful, let me know if there's more:
We both have brand new (1 month old) windows 10 PCs
We both get the lag spikes at the same time
This is probably happening in other games we play (WoW, EVE Online, Overwatch) but maybe not as noticable
Our ISP is Comcast XFinity 100+ Mbps
Our cable line does have a splitter to connect to the router and the tv set box
Below is a WinMTR I just ran before posting this, I just let it run while doing nothing but have this website open and you'll see I got a 110ms spike at the first hop and 155ms at the 2nd after just 323 packets (1 per second)

Really appreciate any advice! Thanks

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.0.0.1 - 0 | 323 | 323 | 1 | 2 | 110 | 1 |
| 96.120.104.225 - 0 | 323 | 323 | 8 | 15 | 155 | 15 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider
 
Solution
For you to see the delay in a game you it would have to be many more than just 1 little delay. Sure if you get a full second of delay you will see it but 100ms is 1/10 of a second it is highly unlikely you can detect that.

Instead of winmtr open multiple cmd windows and run constant ping to the router and the isp router. When you see issues in the game you need to see if there are corresponding delays.

If possible it would be better to run the ping tests from a different machine so you could see if you see problems at the same time your game see them. This would indicate if you should look at your router or your pc. You can I suppose just blindly replace the router and hope it fixes the problem.

Something that tiny is going...
It really should not be possible for that to happen on a ethernet connection. It technically can't really be the network. The copper cable itself does not delay. The ports always send at 1gbit speed no matter what and unlike wireless there is no data retransmission.

This means the router is busy doing something else when it receives the ping packet or the computer is telling lies regarding the time it receives the reply data. There is a difference between when it receives it and when it actually processes it.

Generally neither of this is real likely. A router running large filtering lists or vpn might be slowed down. On a PC it can be anything but tends to be video drivers that need large amounts of cpu in games. Also there are many people that report strange issues like this with the so called LAN accelerators. Killer in particular has issues from time to time with their drivers. You could try to uninstall the killer software and replace the lan drivers with the version off their web site that does not have the killer features.

Now you have to really consider does 1 packet getting delayed out of 300 really cause any issue you can detect in a game. Even if the packet was completely lost how much impact would that really have. In most cases to see a problem in a game you have to be around the 10% range of delayed or lost packets.
 

Rohrzk

Honorable
Nov 18, 2016
9
0
10,510


I don't think I have "killer" as my network driver? In the Device Manager it says I have Intel Ethernet I218-V. Where would I see my LAN drivers?

For your other question about if it impacts, the answer is yes. It impacts so much that we can't enjoy playing anymore. In a MOBA type game when you get a lag spike it is immediately noticeable because you're constantly giving your character click commands and expecting them to respond immediately. When a lag spike hits even for a second, your character will delay and you miss important shots, etc. I could close the ping monitor and still be able to tell exactly when each spike happens, it seems to happen more often in the game, like every 30-60 sec.
 
For you to see the delay in a game you it would have to be many more than just 1 little delay. Sure if you get a full second of delay you will see it but 100ms is 1/10 of a second it is highly unlikely you can detect that.

Instead of winmtr open multiple cmd windows and run constant ping to the router and the isp router. When you see issues in the game you need to see if there are corresponding delays.

If possible it would be better to run the ping tests from a different machine so you could see if you see problems at the same time your game see them. This would indicate if you should look at your router or your pc. You can I suppose just blindly replace the router and hope it fixes the problem.

Something that tiny is going to be extremely hard to find.
 
Solution