help with improving game pings pls!

[Bacardi151]

like the message of this thread is asking...what does it take?

i'm spiking hard on all servers when i try to play some CS. i have cable, although it's only 353/90 (down/up), it should still be able to handle playing a 6 year old game!

could it be because i'm on a wireless network? what can i do to fix this? any suggestions?

thanks in advance

 

[Crusty]

is that 353 kbits or kbytes / sec?

 

[Falloutboy]

Ouch and I thought my 300kbs upload was bad

 

[Crusty]

I'm guess that those are kByte speeds and not kbit speeds, which would mean he has a 3mbit/768kbit connection. In which case you have plenty of bandwidth to be playing cs without lag. Are you running lots of p2p software, or do you ahve people that share your connection that do?

Also, ping sites like google and yahoo and see if you get inconsistent response times there.

ping -t google.com
ping -t yahoo.com

If you are getting inconsistent response times, try a traceroute to some servers and see if you can isolate where the latency is occuring.

 

[TheCause]

You can't complain with that speed, but there are some basic things you can do to tweak your latency. First make sure that you don't have anything running in your background like others have suggested. Concider reformatting if you have the time / patience / knowhow. What I think you'd really like though would be QoS ( Quality of Service ). This is helpful if you have a shared internet connection or if you have multiple connections open at once. You can purchase a Linksys WRT54G and do all kinds of awesome routing with ease, or look for another gateway router that has QoS features. The best is to have high medium and low priority settings like you can get on the WRT54G. You do have to use third-party firmware if you want this.

 

[Bacardi151]

no it is not kbyte..i wish!

it's 353kbit and 90kbit up! i used to have a 2Mbit down, but it went down dramatically after i got this new wireless networking stuff.

i used to run p2p stuff, but even when i dont have the p2p stuff on while trying to CS, it still won't run fast.

i have a program that measures the amount of bandwidth used while surfing. i remember once when playing CS, i was downing at around 2.xx kbyte/s (meaning 2 point something) and upping around 1.xx kbyte/s. i still do that, but i lag like, perhaps spiking..i dont know but it looks consistent ..the latency that is...around 800-1500 ping...it's horrible!

what could be the problem??

 

[Bacardi151]

Originally posted by: TheCause
You can't complain with that speed, but there are some basic things you can do to tweak your latency. First make sure that you don't have anything running in your background like others have suggested. Concider reformatting if you have the time / patience / knowhow. What I think you'd really like though would be QoS ( Quality of Service ). This is helpful if you have a shared internet connection or if you have multiple connections open at once. You can purchase a Linksys WRT54G and do all kinds of awesome routing with ease, or look for another gateway router that has QoS features. The best is to have high medium and low priority settings like you can get on the WRT54G. You do have to use third-party firmware if you want this.

i'm not the admin of this network (it's a home network..my brother runs the network). i make sure i keep everything closed, i virtually only have 2 or 3 programs using the internet....AIM, Steam (CS), and sometimes IE browser

but the problem is that i can't seem to get a good ping with CS. in fact i've come to realize that i rarely get more than 1kbyte upload on CS, which might cause the lag.

but i have the capability to upload faster on other applications....such as IEbrowser...when i ran a bandwidth test...i used to be able to upload at 30kbytes/s but it seems like i maxed out at 12 or so...which makes my upload at 90kbit/s on that test...

anyways, my point is that i can upload faster than 1kbyte per second....but CS can't seem to allow that to happen....which causes that awful lag...any suggestions on why this occurs...and how i can fix it?

 

[vapidtransit]

Latency to the internet does not necessarily have anything to do with your bandwidth. When I was lucky back in the dial-up days I could get a steady ping around 200 ms over a 56k dial up connection.

Hell, I've been having a problem in which I get ping spikes and 7% packet loss and my bandwidth is 500 kb/s through rcn cable in chicago.

Try this test:

click the start button
click "run"
type "cmd"
(a black DOS-looking window will open)
at the prompt type "ipconfig"
note what ip addy it gives you for your default gateway
type "ping xxx.xxx.xx.xx -t" replacing the xxx's with the ip addy it gave you as your default gateway.

Let it run for 10 minutes, then Ctrl +c to stop the test.

It will report your high ping, low ping, average ping and % loss. If you get a high average ping and % loss then you have a problem communicating to your first hop on the internet. This may be an indication that:
1. something within your network or computer is not working properly (you already eliminated other programs as a source of trouble)
2. Your ISP's equipment is dropping packets at the actual gateway (there's not much you can do about this except call and complain)
3. a myriad of other annoying issues such as a faulty cable/dsl modem, an atypical signal strength if you have cable, screwy TCP/IP settings on your machine etc etc.

If the ping test gives good results then you are losing packets somewhere else along your trace route to the CS server. You should go to www.broandbandreports.com, find their line quality test and run it. It will ping your IP addy from the east coast and west coast and it will report the packet loss to you.


Honestly though, before you do any of this, ask your brother if you can bypass the router and wire directly into the internet. If this fixes your problem then you can conclude that your router/wireless is messing things up.

 

[Bacardi151]

i do know that there's something wrong with my wireless card. my brother is the only one using wired connection, as the router is in his room and i guess having wires running in his room is no big deal rather than having em running around the house. anyways, my dad and i both are on wireless connections and we're both experiencing horrible connections. and this all started when we switched over to these adapters (we used to have some other adapters , some 802.11b, and these adapters , 802.11g, makes the other ones look godlike....)

i've been on wired connection before, and it was going flawless, but as mentioned before, after switching over, it has just gone straight down the toilet.

but yeah, i sometimes get a decent ping, just like an hour ago i was playing CS, then all of a sudden i start getting a ping of 1000+. so why would i during one period of the day get a good ping and the rest be sh1t? is it really hardware problems or is there something else to it? i'm going to run the tests and see how it goes though. will report back soon. thanks for the tip btw.

 

[Bacardi151]

ok i'm getting request time out when i try to ping the default gateway IP....am i pinging the right IP?

 

[Bacardi151]

i've been pinging yahoo.com and it gives me a pretty low ping for my avg (about 80-90ish, which is good enough for me when i play CS), and my lowest ping is about 35-40ish, although i occassionally get a really high ping...sometimes 350, and i remember yesterday i got like 1800.

in fact, just at this very moment my avg ping is good, but yesterday when i was trying this ping process out, my avg ping was around 1800 !! so what the hell is going on?? why is it good at a certain time of the day and the other time of the day it's acting up. does that have to do with my brother ? as in, is he doing something with the internet connection which causes this awful lag? cuz it ALWAYS happens at a certain time of the day i think....the day before yesterday i was playing CS with a decent ping, until midnight and it went down the drain, and the same scenario for yesterday as well....played CS without any real complaining until midnight and it went down the drain, and then the following morning it's ok again.

something just doesnt really make sense.

right now it's ok, giving me some avg ping of 80-90, and the highest ping around 300, which i'm fine with....i can live with a spike lag every so often as long as it doesnt happen every minute. but i know for a fact, at least from this pattern, that my ping will hit a ridiculous high value this coming midnight.....so through this pattern, what would you guys conclude the real issue to be? can it possibly still just be a hardware problem? or is something triggered ....manually that is.

edit:

here's my result btw

Packets: Sent = 775, Received = 750, Lost = 25 (3% loss
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 30ms, Maximum = 881ms, Average = 104ms


3% loss, isn't too bad is it? and in this case my avg ping is 104ms, something i'd still wouldnt complain about, since i'm used to that ping...so anything under 150 on CS would be good for me.