Hello Pete,

me and several other people who use the same ISP are currently suffering from interruptions (4-6 seconds) during online gaming. I am currently investigating this by using PingPlotter (btw this is really a great tool, thanks for development !!). In the example below I observed two different destination servers simultaneously. Everytime when the connection to the destination servers was interrupted hop 5 and the destination servers show 100% packet loss at the same time (for the upper server also hop 8). I assume the problem occurs at or between hop 4 and 5 (last hops from my ISP). As this mainly happens at peak hours I guess this is some sort of overloading.

Am i interpreting this correct ? And can you explain me why show some intermediate hops (6, 7, 9) no problems at all ?

Kind regards,
Steff

Can you share your .pp2 file for some more in-depth analysis? You can either attach it to a reply here, or email it to support@pingplotter.com.

Thanks,
Pete

Hi Pete,

I attached two sample sets from above servers.

Thanks for your assistance!

Regards,
Steff

This one isn't a slam-dunk to diagnose. It looks pretty compelling that there's an issue mid-route that's causing packet loss at the final destination. What's not so clear is why there are good hops interspersed with the bad ones.

It sounds like the final destination's packet loss is matching up with your actual real-life experience (dropped connections and freezes). This lends a pretty strong story to the packet loss you're seeing.

The most likely reason for having some good hops is that the return route is what's causing the problems, and that different routers along the way are picking different return routes. Here's a situation where being able to trace from the target back to you would be a great help.

Most providers have multiple "peers" to send data to the bigger internet. If your outbound data is going on one of these (one that is working fine), but some of the targets along the way having routing tables that would prefer a different carrier (one with problems), then you could see results like this. The hard part is that you don't know which carrier is causing the problem - it's not the outbound one (that shows up in the route), or downstream hops wouldn't show as good. So there's some other "problem" carrier / router / link that is causing the problem which almost certainly isn't listed in PingPlotter.

I would recommend starting with your ISP to see if they are having problems with one of their providers, or if they recognize this problem. If they don't know about anything, try pushing them a bit (someone in their network almost certainly *does* know something about it, just not the person you're talking to). If you run into a dead end there, it might be worthwhile to try tracing back from a problem endpoint to get the return route. That might tell you which carrier is causing the problem. If 4netplayers.de is hosting a server that you have control over, you may be able to run PingPlotter on that server and trace back to yourself. If it's not, then see if that provider has any troubleshooting tools that include traceroute and see which route that shows (and which hops in that return route are not listed in your outbound route).

Hi Pete,

thank you very much for your detailed conclusion!

I will further investigate this.

Bye,
Steff