I was disappointed to see there weren't a host of groupies here willing an able to help a person interpret PingPlot data to help people solve their problem. If there is such a forum or newsgroup the moderator might want to put that in a sticky/pinned post.

I am using the free version. I'm having problems with very slow header downloads from my newsgroup service.

Here a couple of plots. One from yesterday and one from today.

The response time looks bad but I don't know how to interpret it. One thing that very confusing is the response time of my own router. It seems to ofter run about 250 milliseconds.

There are some folks over at BroadBand reports in the forums there that sometimes comment on PingPlotter data. Your best bet, though, is to do what you've done - post it here. We spend more time thinking about PingPlotter data than just about anyone else does. Broadband reports sometimes helps if it's a provider-based problem, because multiple people might be seeing the same thing.

In your case, though, it's probably not a provider-based problem. Hop 1 is showing latency spikes similar to your downstream hops, which really points to a problem at hop 1. Since this is an internal router (I assume), you may be able to fix this problem without involving your ISP.

I'd start out by trying to isolate the problem by removing as many components between you and hop 2 as possible. If Hop 2 is your cable modem, try plugging your computer directly into your cable modem (make sure your software firewall is working well, of course!) and see if the problem still continues. If it does, that isolates the problem back to your computer, or the cable between your computer and the router (now, the cable modem). If the problem goes away, then you know it's something in the router - or some of the hardware / wiring that are no longer participating.

If you're using a wireless modem, try using a wired connection instead. Wireless devices sometimes perform poorly because of the environment, or maybe there's something wrong with the hardware.

If you have another computer, try collecting data from that computer. Maybe there's something wrong with the network card or driver, and using another computer helps isolate that.

Sometimes, the problem is a bit easier to troubleshoot when you show graphs over time. Our PingPlotter Standard product will let you turn on a time graph for hop 1 which will show you the latency over time. Try out our 30 day trial for this while you're troubleshooting.

- Pete

Wow that was quick. I have another (actually two more) computer. I don't know why I didn't think of testing on it. Thanks for your help.

In case you're interested here's a plot to you: