Now, here is the nitty gritty.

I have no IP or DNS name displayed on hop 7. Overall, the the ping to each hop is pitiful. Starting at an average of 109 at hop 1 and climbing to an average of 299 at hop 15 with some 330's throw in around 9 and 10.

Now, up until recently, my ping while playing on the server was right around 100ms. (You can check ingame.) However, during the last few days it has risen to over 500 on occasion and is sitting around 300. Obviously this is unplayable, so I've spent hours tonight looking at ways to figure out what the problem is.

I stumbled upon this program and found that the 7th hop is reporting 100% Packet Loss. This is obviously a bad thing. However, just knowing that I'm getting 100% PL doesn't do much when I don't know the DNS or IP of this hop.

Someone please say they can help me.

I don't know if this is useful, but these are the IP's and DNS names of hops 6 and 8.

#6 12.122.11.125 tbr2-pol3601.sL9mo.ip.att.net

#8 12.122.12.94 ggrl-p380.dLstx.ip.att.net
(I capitalized the L's because of the font, they looked like one's.)

cuenca97@hotmail.com
Edge

Thanks in advance.

The fact that a single hop (7) isn't responding actually doesn't indicate anything wrong, specifically, with hop 7. There are sometimes routers in the chain that just don't respond to ICMP echo requests (specifically, TTL=0 ICMP echo requests), but they pass data along to the next router just fine. In your case, because there is data being passed on to hop 8, hop 7 is working at least partially.

You always have to look at downstream hops when troubleshooting any problem. In your case, hop 7 isn't reporting back, but it does pass data to hop 8 (and 9 and beyond). The only thing we *really* care about is the way data is reaching the final destination - if the final destination is performing well, we don't really care about any packet loss or latency being reported by any intermediate hop. We *do*, however, care about data in an intermediate hop when that hop is adding packet loss or latency to all downstream hops. So if you were seeing 100% packet loss at hop 7, and all downstream hops - then we might have a problem.

Now, what you're really trying to do is figure out where the problem is starting. You don't say what kind of a connection you have - dial-up, DSL, etc. If you're on a dialup, then 100ms at hop 1 is about what is expected. If you're on DSL, then 100ms at hop 1 is a problem.

To make things easier to troubleshoot, we need more data, including:

1) Information about your connection type
2) A Ping Plotter graph (or save file data - .pp2). This should include a period of poor performance, and ideally, a period of good performance (if you have one of these). If you don't ever have good performance, then just a period of poor performance would be OK.
3) Any information about the affects of the problem - symptoms, speculation about cause, any changes to your environment that happened about the same time you started seeing problems, etc.

Feel free to shoot some data to us at support@pingplotter.com and we'll post a response to this post along with a picture. Ideally, the data you send would be a PingPlotter save file in .pp2 format and would have at least 100 samples (but ideally, a few hours or more of collected data). Please .ZIP the save file before you send it.

Here is the graph that was sent:



It looks like the *first* place you should look is between you and hop 1. The latencies I see in the graph you sent are pretty unacceptable. Do these happen constantly, or just during high load times? If you run Ping Plotter for 24 hours and look at a 24 hour graph of hop 1, how does it look? If 4am looks different than 8pm, then you might have too many subscribers on your local segment (a problem with cable sometimes - but not as often as one might think). If you consistently have problems throughout the entire 24 hour period at hop 1, then there's probably something wrong with either your cable modem's connection to the network, or possibly even something inside your own home network. Based on your description of your home network (BEFSR41, 100 megabit card), I'd suspect that it's not your local network, unless there's a bad cable involved. It's also possible your PC may have some configuration option set on it that is causing problems - but I'm no expert on troubleshooting local PC problems. If you have another PC that has similar results, then you can eliminate your PC as a problem.

Another thing you should be sure to check is to make sure your PC isn't using excessive bandwidth. It may be that you have some kind of a trojan installed that is accessing the network and overwhelming your connection - or you may be intentionally running a program that uses a lot of bandwidth. Either of these things could cause results similar to what you're seeing.

Make sure you check with DSL Reports to see if others in your area are reporting problems. Also, if your ISP has a local support forum, or there are newsgroups where local users may hang out, check to see if others on your local cable system are having problems. Next, contact your Cable provider and complain about poor performance. You shouldn't be getting 150 ms average pings to hop 1 - so you should express this to them. Email them Ping Plotter graphs and have them send someone to troubleshoot your connection (actually, you should expect that your support person will be helpful and will suggest good things to try - so go through everything your support person suggests until they give up. Many times, they will determine the correct fix for the problem without you having to push them to do so).

Once you've troubleshot your local hop 1 latency problems, then you can look beyond to downstream problems, if you still have them. The "oversubscribed" term can be taken in several contexts - one being that they have too many subscribers on your local segment - and the local segment's bandwidth capability is being oversaturated. This problem would be local to your neighborhood only. Another definition of "oversubscribed" is that they don't have enough bandwidth exiting their facility to service all their requirements. Usually, this happens on a broader scale - ie: the size of a large city. Based on your description of problems, I can't point at either of these as problems (mostly, because of the timing of the problem you're seeing). Usually, oversubscription manifests itself as periodic high latency and packet loss - and that period is almost always from 8pm till 1am on a consumer system. Running Ping Plotter continuously for days will help you see if there is a pattern to your problems.

I hope this gives you some ideas on next steps. If you've already talked to your ISP about this problem, feel free to shoot back your response here and maybe I can come up with some additional suggestions for you. Also, saving the data (in .pp2 format) with a goodly amount of data collected would allow me to analyze it a bit (24 or 48 hours, possibly, zipped up and emailed to me).