Monitor ping over a game session?

[clok1966]

I have had the same provider for 5 years (midco) and had great service. I do online gaming (to much actually) and in the last 4-5 months had horrible lag spikes. Its very noticeable in in FPS like L4d2, or games like WOW or WoT's.. your avatar will just keep doing stuff but , but the game wont recognize it, then the old rubber band or frame skip when it catches up, its seldom for more then 2-4 seconds, but that's an eternity in a twitch game. I had no issues for 4 plus years, but now its making online games a bit painful at times. the big problem, downloads (steam, streaming) all seem fine and when i talk to MidCo i get the standard provider reply, its not us its YOU. And to top it off, its not in any regular pattern or constant. I can play a L4D2 match (30 minutes average) and only see it once a match, then tomorrow it will do it 3 times during a 30 minute period. All the tools i find to test anything run a 1-3 minute test and are done, i need something to show Midco this is happening, i need something that monitors PING i am assuming (like i say a 2 hour download of a steam game doesnt show any drops (with steams download monitor, maybe its not complex enough to show this?) and Streaming any video never do i see any dips, hicups, (netflix hd etc..) as in the past i have had poor connects (ping) and its just like that. I'm not a big network guy, know the basics, but am assuming (maybe I'm wrong) my bandwidth is fine, but im getting lag spikes (ping) hence the streaming that buffers doesnt notice it at all but the games who are doing real time streaming make it noticeable. I almost wish it was steady , every few minutes, so it was easier to see, but often i can play 10 to 30 minutes before it happens. Midco said its my machine, but i have several PC's and have this issue on all of them, I even lugged my PC to the router and plugged it in direct with the same results (what a pain in the ass to play games decent again). I have done the following, (reinstall of OS, yes i did this), 4 different wireless parts (2 usb and 2 plug in cards), router has been rebooted and even reset to defaults a couple of times. In the last 5 months i actually upgraded my whole PC so its now a 100% new machine, still the same. Anybody have some suggestions, i can find all sorts of realtime bandwidth monitors but they measure bandwidth not ping.. Hell, maybe it is my machine, but again, 3 different PC all do this on WOW, so i cant see how, but im so desperate I will suspend normal thinking in get in that magical "it just is" area and use any suggestions. I imagine something that pings every second is going to be hard to come across as in the past wasn't that used as an attack on many websites? Help I'm desperate.

 

[XavierMace]

The enter key allows you to break up your text into paragraphs. Just an FYI. That said, there's nothing stopping you from having a constant ping running while playing a game so I'm not sure what you're looking for.

 

[clok1966]

Sorry for lack of {space} or enter keys, depending on the screen you are on and
how you have it stretched out it can look like this, And people complain about that too.
I thank you for replying just for fun you may want to read this
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149885

But back to my issue, many places do not allow ping, as I stated, people use
it as an attack sometimes (constant pinging a server from a bunch of PCs) so
many places do not allow it non stop (maybe this is not an issue like it was in
the past). I am just looking for any tool that will give me some kind of printout
screen i can use to document my ping over a gaming session that i can use
to show my provider. I don't do networking as i say and have just a limited
knowledge on it. I was hoping somebody with more knowledge would have some
idea on what i could do to monitor my connections for lag (and my limited
knowledge makes me think its PING that i want to measure, but maybe I am
wrong).

thanks again for attempting to help me.

 

[XavierMace]

If the destination you're wanting to test your connection to is blocking ICMP (aka ping), then a different tool isn't going to help. A tool like PingPlotter will give you a bit more info, but still relies on ICMP being allowed. That said, blocking ICMP isn't all that common except by companies more concerned about security (IE banks, healthcare providers, etc). I'd be surprised if the game servers you're connecting to block ICMP.

 

[clok1966]

Thank you I will look at that.