I recently moved and now have a new ISP and ever since then I've been having severe lag and latency issues. I'm "suppose" to have 4mg download. I can browse the web okay most of the time and upload files but I'm a gamer and this is where my problems REALLY come into play (pardon the pun).

I play Lineage II and the latency is so bad I've resorted to getting a dial up account! I've emailed NCsoft.. they say it's my ISP. My ISP says the problem lies with NCsoft though they have admitted to having bandwidth problems and "say" they're updating their equipment though they refuse to give me an eta.

NCsoft game me the link to PingPlotter which is a brilliant tool!.. but for the life of me I can't figure out which hop is where my problems begin.

Can you take a look at this image and see if you can give me a bit of info so I can take that to either my ISP or NCsoft? I also have a pp2 file I can email if that'll help.

Thanks for any help you can give me with this. I've gotten killed more times than I can count because of this problem.

Rhiannon

Thanks for the picture!

For most networks, 10 minutes isn't enough time to get a great idea of what's wrong. You're showing the time graphs for hop 2, and it has similar problems to what I see at hop 9, so my initial thoughts are that there's some issue very close to you.

Before getting too far, though, how about a bit more data? What's great is collecting a few hours (or a day, if the problem has any relationship to time of day) and then looking for problems. I see light packet loss here, but nothing killer. The latency is OK and the packet loss is something you can probably recover from.

Set up a 1 second trace interval and run it while you're gaming. When you get a disconnect / lag (maybe that's all the time, though?), make a note of it.

If you send your collected data (File -> Save Sample Set) to us at support@pingplotter.com, we'll have a look at it and see if there's anything more obvious than this picture.

Based on this 10 minute shot, though, you have packet loss at hop 1 that's showing up at other hops in the route. More data might make a stronger case for this.

If it is a problem at hop 1, it might be an issue with your cable modem itself, something inside your network, or something inside the ISP. If you're using a wireless network, can you connect via a cable and route around the wireless network temporarily and make sure it's not a problem with your end? If you have another computer there, you might also run PingPlotter from that just to eliminate any network card / cabling issues hooking up to your own PC.

Once you've eliminated anything in your own control as a possibility, then you can contact your ISP with some graphs - hopefully something a bit more compelling. If it is an ISP problem, then you can probably trace to your ISP and show the same problem. Try tracing to qwest.net and see if you see similar packet loss problems - localizing the problem to something your ISP can deal with (making it something they can't blame on someone else) can sometimes be helpful.

- Pete

Hi Pete,

I'm getting ready to log into Lineage now but will be playing on dial up so I don't die. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Before going to bed I'll log in with my cable modem and do a night long trace.

I can tell you it's not my modem. They switched it out and I had the same problems. Not a router issue either.. not using one any longer. I have another PC here and it was experiencing the same latency issues. I play the game fine on dial up with some lag/latency but not like I get with cable! Go figure.

I'll send my pp2 file to the email address you provided tomorrow.

Rhiannon

P.S. Looking at the graph.. what distinguishes the latency? The packet loss is easy to see.