Severe Latency Spikes

I posted this on reddit:


Hey

I have a problem. I've been experiencing severe Lag Spikes for around a week now.

It started off by being spikes that went up from my normal 30-ish ms ping to around 120ms, staying there for 1-3 seconds and going back down again.

That on it's own was mildly infuriating but..I mean it didn't break the game for me and I figured it would last a couple days until it passes.



Well, it didn't pass. So today:

-I restarted my router for the second time,

-updated my Geforce drivers (knowing that that wouldn't change anything),

-cleared my cache,

-did "ipconfig /flushdns",

-checked whether my firewall let PoE through (yes),

-checked if there was any program using up a bunch of my bandwidth (no)

-restarted PoE a bunch of times

-tried different Gateways (Germany here so: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam)

-tried swapping to Predictive from always using Lockstep

And none of these things did anything. Quite the opposite to be honest because after I restarted the router I started getting Spikes up to 1500ms+ which sadly makes the game a little bit unplayable for me.



So I figured I'd ask around here, since I'm not savvy enough when it comes to network related stuff..

I don't exactly know what kind of info would be useful but I'll list everything I could think off.

- winMTR: https://pastebin.com/0UXGS7mH

- Pingplotter: https://pastebin.com/2CaFPszE

- Pingplotter Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/O86LMEo

- Video proof (Graphs): https://streamable.com/1glt7v

I used the IP of the most recent map instance where that clip originated from.

"Kabel-Deutschland" is my provider

I'm on LAN, usually my ping sits around 30-40ms

Nothing in my setup changed over the past week

Windows 10, Ryzen 7 3800x, GTX 1070ti, 16GB DDR4 Ram, aorus b550

Using the Google DNS

I kind of feel like my internet has "slowed down" a bit too as in buffering longer on YouTube etc. but that might be placebo/biased since ..well I'm reeaally paying attention to every little micro stutter now.

Any ideas?

If there's anything that's missing, my bad! I couldn't think of anything else someone might need but please let me know if I should provide you with anything else :)



Thanks in advance!

You are getting packet loss that carries forward from your second hop = bad which is also why you are seeing 2+ second ping spikes, which is just stupidly high. There is something borked with that node.

Contact your ISP. Tell them that you are getting packet loss and it's affecting your ability to do what you want to online. Make sure that they see your MTR as that is the proof that they will need to see that something is borked.

"

You are getting packet loss that carries forward from your second hop = bad which is also why you are seeing 2+ second ping spikes, which is just stupidly high. There is something borked with that node.

Contact your ISP. Tell them that you are getting packet loss and it's affecting your ability to do what you want to online. Make sure that they see your MTR as that is the proof that they will need to see that something is borked.

Damn it. Hoped I wouldn't have to do that haha but thanks for the reply! Will do.

Out of curiosity, how would I interpret those numbers? Like, what are the indicators for that conclusion?

Actually, I had too many windows open. You have packet loss that starts at your router/modem (When I glanced at the trace the first time, that 6 looked like a 0 - doh). Power cycle them both (unplug them for at least a minute then plug them back in). PL goes away, you are good. If not, then contact your ISP. Wired or wireless? If wireless, try going wired if you can. It's not recommended to play POE on wireless.

As for how to read the WinMTR (Just going to use the first line here):

SAGEMCOM - 6 | 731 | 692 | 1 | 5 | 1541 | 1 |

1st hop is your router/modem depending on your setup. 6 indicates the packet loss %. This should always be 0. The PL carries through to the end of the trace, which means it's real PL. If you just had an odd hop here or there with a %, that isn't real PL. It MUST carry through to the end.

731/692 - Packets sent/received. This should always be the same.

Best/avg/worst 1/5/1541 - Self explanatory. Fastest the packets came back, average packet time, worst. That 1541 is 1.5 seconds, which is stupidly high.

Last - is the time the latest packet took.