Pingman Tools Home Forums PingPlotter PingPlotter Support Need help identifying problem in chart.

So i've had an odd problem for a while (I remember it happening since the end of march) and i've done so much troubleshooting for it i think i'm at the end of the line it seems.

So the actual internet service went down for just a couple of hours around the end of march or so(no word from ISP) then came back on, but since then, in online games, it seems like the latency spikes up very high but i've almost never been able to pin point the latency actually spiking. My person in game pretty much stutters for less than a second and it occurs about 3 or 4 times a minute.

The reason i haven't been able to prove it being latency specifically for a while is because it happens so fast that nothing i use can get a good look at the MS when it does spike. But, my VoIP graphs the latency as soon as it oddly spikes up, and my cmd charted the peaks of my ping when i was pinging google, and there are high spikes. But sometimes the problem happens and it doesn't look like any high latency was detected while it was happening. When i'm pinging google on the command prompt, the average is 4ms and it peaks 18ms.

I didn't mean to drag the text part of the post out this long but i'm trying to detail the problem as well as possible and will be open to answer any questions if it will bring me closer to a diagnosis. I've added the pp2 file and the image file for the chart pinging google in pingplotter. Thanks.

EDIT: (My connection is wired) I forgot to include all my troubleshooting steps i've went through that haven't fixed the problem so i'll try to list them all in order, although i may leave some out. I initially changed multiple router settings through routerlogin.com but that doesn't matter much as you'll find out why in a second. After that, i've done things such as switch to ethernet/wired internet and completely disabled the wireless setting for internet, then i had upgraded to a better plan from my ISP which i didn't suspect would do too much anyways. I then factory reset my router completely, and it still hadn't fixed it. I disabled and enabled QoS and wifi multimedia which didn't change anything. That's about all i can think of as far as trying to fix the problem goes.

Hello,

Thank you for providing all the details and the files that you did, those help significantly when trying to get to the bottom of an issue.

I've taken a look at the image you provided and have opened the .pp2 file, and nothing within either of those signifies any type of problem that I can tell.

There are a couple of things that you can do that might help us track down the root cause:
-Tracing to the game(s) servers that you are having a problem with (if you're not having problems with google, then tracing to google does not usually provide valuable insight)
-Tracing to the server(s) for long periods of time, rather than just when you're experiencing the problems

I'd suggest leaving PingPlotter running and tracing to the server(s) that you're having problems with, then if you're able to capture the issue occurring on that server, we *should* be able to take a look and get an idea of where things are going awry.

We do have a guide that gives several tips and tricks of how you can use PingPlotter to pinpoint where the problems are occurring, and also what you can do with that information to better your case. I'd recommend giving that a read and seeing if that can be of help:

http://pingplotter.com/fix-your-network

Cheers,
Kody

Thank you for the reply!

I took two more samples connecting to two different games. In the blizz.pp2 file, i don't know how to explain how the server worked that was used in the sample, but simple, it makes a server with it's own unique ip but it has dedicated hosting, so i don't know why but it has 100%pl at the last hop, but i don't think it's that big of a deal, because i've provided two samples. Please look thoroughly at both of them because it might not be packet loss, but just ping spikes at certain hops.

Hello!

Were these results captured during periods that you were experiencing issues with your game? In the "srcsample.pp2" file you provided, we can definitely see some clear spikes in latency (which looks to be occurring somewhere between hop #9 and #10 in the route) - but without knowing if this correlates to an instance where you were experiencing issues with your game, it's tough to say for certain if it's the culprit in the problem you're trying to chasing down.

To narrow things down a bit further, your best bet would be to set PingPlotter up to trace continuously (24/7, if possible) in the background while you play your game. From there, your goal should be to to try and correlate any problems you're experiencing playing your game to any patterns you can identify in your PingPlotter results. When you experience issues in your game, make note of it in PingPlotter (more details on how to do this here: http://www.pingplotter.com/manual/time_line_graphing.html), so you can see if any "problem" patterns are present in your PingPlotter results when you're actually running into problems with your game connection. If you're interested we cover this practice in quite a bit more detail here:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/47

Hopefully this helps get you headed in the right direction! If you have any other questions - please let us know.

Best wishes,

-Gary