Low Ping & No Throughput

[MikeD83]

My question is: is it possible to have very low pings and very little throughput?

I have COX@Home cable internet access and had a problem the other night. I would get low pings to hosts (100% back), but a website
would take about 10 seconds before it responded. And for that brief time that it responded it was super fast. CNN.com would be a white screen for 10 seconds and then be up in less than a second. I checked sites with their IPs to rule out a DNS problem.
I also experience a fairly consistent lag when I play Counter-Strike online. I would receive very low pings and then all of a sudden I will lag. The lag causes me not to move for 3 seconds, then I can move for 2 seconds, then I can't for 3; this cycle repeats for about 30 seconds.

I think COX@Home may be playing tricks in their network. I have heard of bandwidth shappers (my college has one). Can anyone figure this one out?
- Mike

 

[BlitzRommel]

I used to have an SDSL line that was only 160kbps, but I usually ping <40ms to any server in the US or Canada.

 

[spidey07]

sounds like a slow DNS resolver to me. Even if you accessed the page by IP address there are other links on the page that it might want to resolve.

Can you run nslookup and try some simple queries and see if you get a good response? How long does it take when you ping something by name for the IP address to be returned?

<edit> that wouldn't have anything to do with counter strike though. maybe the ISP is overloaded and needs to disable the accounts of those running routers.

 

[Abzstrak]

I agree check the DNS server...

Other than that, yes they can be very different.. do some reading on the differences between bandwidth and latency

 

[MikeD83]

Thanks guys!

I did a couple of nslookups and always got a quick response. I never even though of the fact that the page probably linked to other sistes that needed DNS lookups (idiot). I'll definately remember to use this command next time.

I did some reading on bandwidth vs latency, my only question is: is there a way to figure out the latency of a connection?
- Mike

 

[Buddha Bart]

sure, on a windows machine type this in the command prompt
ping -n40 www.google.com

and look at your averages (at the end). Post 'em here.

bart

PS: also, use some other hosts

 

[MikeD83]

It's interesting how the linux machine consistently has a lower ping. What is Mdev under linux?
- Mike

www.google.com
From my Windows machine:
Min: 124ms, Max: 165ms, Avg: 129ms
From my Linux Machine:
Min: 99.3ms, Max: 479.6ms, Avg: 119.3ms, Mdev: 58ms

www.anandtech.com
From my Windows machine:
Min: 64ms, Max: 130ms, Avg: 74ms
From my Linux Machine:
Min: 59ms, Max: 104.2ms, Avg: 63.9ms, Mdev: 9.2ms

www.tomshardware.com
From my Windows machine:
Min: 45ms, Max: 65ms, Avg: 49ms
From my Linux Machine:
Min: 35.9ms, Max: 95.7ms, Avg: 46.9ms, Mdev: 10.5ms

 

[Buddha Bart]

those are some really nice pings, with the exception of whatever the heck happened to that one on its way to/from google.

check different times of day. late afternoon + early evening usualy are the worst. But frankly, if you're average doesnt break 120, you've got a pretty sweet connection.

bart