Sub-par ping

[Brockavich]

So as of late it seems in a LOT of games where I should be experiencing little to no lag or pings or less than 100 easy, I'm getting 100, 200, and 300 pings. I live in Canada, and for some reason I'm getting pings of nearly 200 from games hosted in the midwest USA. This normally is NOT the case. I usually get about 50 or less when they're that close. I have a fairly high speed connection as well as more insult to injury. However, what's really strange is it doesn't happen all the time nor is it constant. I mean one day I can be pretty much lag free, and the next, after playing for 20 minutes my character is warping every 2 seconds.

Now I realize something like this can be a complex issue and not easily solved, but I'd like your thoughts anyways.

What are some things you recommend I look at/try to bring my ping back up to normal?

I'm thinking:
1. Windows Firewall could be ******* things up
2. My ISP could simply be having issues as of late
3. The host/server is to blame (not me)



W/e, toss some ideas at me would you please? thanks tom's!

 

[Herr_Koos]

There are no latency guarantees on the internet, so unless you made changes on your side that affected the performance, this is most likely not something you can fix.

Try the traceroute command instead of ping to see if latency on any particular hop is bad.

 

[Brockavich]

Okay i tried traceroute and I got pings from 1-78 after about 4-5 hops. On average, 20-30 ping. So that's good... I'm starting to think it's my ISP's fault :/

 

[Brockavich]

But I still cant shake the feeling that Windows Firewall or AVG Free 2011 might be interefering. I havent made any major changes to networking settings or hardware recently so... yeah

Any kind of optimizations you guys would recommend?