Hopefully someone reading this can provide a bit of insight regarding this issue we’ve been having at home recently. My brain is fried thinking about it.
The Issue:
Earlier this week (Monday, March 9), I noticed that while playing some WoW that everything started lagging. Cast times, looting, walking in a straight line even – my ping to the servers (usually always between 20-50ms), suddenly started to spike higher and higher over a period of minutes. Going from 21ms to 100, to 300, 500 ,700, 1000, 1500, 2000 ms. After a period of time – no pattern really, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes an hour, it would go back down to the initial 20-50ms, only for the same thing to repeat itself minutes later. I thought maybe it was just some sort of isolated incident, but this kept happening throughout the day. I slept on it and hoped for the best the following day.
Unfortunately, the same thing was happening the next day and every day even till now. It happens for many different games I’ve tried, all which yield the same results:
WoW – Casting times, looting, walking, moving things around in the inventory, accepting and turning in quests; all this makes the experience unplayable.
Starcraft 2 – delayed response on all commands causing frames to squeeze everything in while issuing commands. The ping spikes fluctuate up and down it seems.
Diablo 3 – All mobs skip around on screen, and character gets stuck in animations only for all the frames to catch up shortly thereafter. Pings show anywhere from 75ms – 1500ms
Path of Exile – As if the servers weren’t hammered enough from the start of the new league, the latency spikes in this game are the most prevalent and noticeable. Nigh unplayable.
Minecraft - Placing down blocks and mining blocks comes with delays of all sorts. Moving in a straight line shows how unstable everything is.
Wolcen – the third ARPG I’ve tried and as above, the results are the same as the others.
All of these programs had the same pattern repeat over and over. Starting off with a ‘normal’ connection which worsened. Sometimes this would take 5-10 minutes for the ping to start increasing, sometimes ping would be high right off the bat.
Here is my setup:
1 Computer Wired to modem
3 Computers Wireless (2.4ghz or 5ghz) – also to modem – I don’t have a router yet; was planning on buying one, but then ran into this whole issue.
Gigabit down, 30mbps UP
At first I thought all this was isolated to the wired PC (the main PC). All these issues manifest themselves on the other 3 wireless connections. Same programs, same issues with the same parameters.
What I’ve done so far:
Speedtest.net, fast.com have reported somewhat normal numbers: ~840-950mbps down and 25-30 up with a 9-11 ms ping. There are times though that the reported numbers are wildly lower though; hovering in the 40mbps-200mbps down. I can’t explain that.
I’ve reached out to my ISP multiple times regarding all this. They sent out a technician on Thursday March 12. He thought that the connectors on the junction box at the side of my house were aged, and so he replaced them and assured me all would be fine That was the only thing he really did other than checking out the connection speed of the network. Of course 30 minutes after he left, the problems started rearing its head again. The ISP has run a full gamut of tests on their end and have reported no problems that they can see at all. Pings have reported normal, no dropped/lost packets. They will be sending a “network specialist’ sometime next week.
I’ve run full antispyware, adware, malware, virus tests on the machines hoping to make sure that there isn’t some intrusion which is causing the problem. All results have come back negative, but I’m not versed enough as to whether these “complete” scan tests are enough.
Thinking at first that it was limited to my main wired PC (i7 3930k @ 4.0ghz, GTX 1080ti, EVO 500 SSD), I thought it was the SSD failing. Running the Samsung Magician diagnostic tool reported everything as fine. Obviously, after testing the other wireless pc’s (approx. same specs) showed that this problem was not isolated to just the main wired rig.
I thought maybe some other device in the household was sucking up a large amount of bandwidth, so I disconnected every other device in the house
-Nvidia Shield
- PS4 pro
-PS4 Slim
- 4 Switches(1 wired, 3 wireless)
-Ipads, iphones,
- Roku stick
- Roku TV
Pretty much everything connected wireless or hardwired in. I isolated it so that it was ONLY the main PC that was connected. That didn’t change a thing
The main thing I’m concerned about are not the speeds, as I’m clearly getting everything as advertised. It’s the pings that are making everything completely unplayable. Why this all of a sudden happened this week beats me. I’ve lived in this house for almost 8 years now and I’ve never experience this issue before. The ISP cant’ find anything at all on their end which might be causing the issue. The best they can do is send out their network specialist, and I’ll have to show him the issues I’m having first hand.
If anyone has any information that they can point me to, that would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps I’m missing something basic and hopefully it’s just something I’ve overlooked.
Thanks for reading, be safe!
The Issue:
Earlier this week (Monday, March 9), I noticed that while playing some WoW that everything started lagging. Cast times, looting, walking in a straight line even – my ping to the servers (usually always between 20-50ms), suddenly started to spike higher and higher over a period of minutes. Going from 21ms to 100, to 300, 500 ,700, 1000, 1500, 2000 ms. After a period of time – no pattern really, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes an hour, it would go back down to the initial 20-50ms, only for the same thing to repeat itself minutes later. I thought maybe it was just some sort of isolated incident, but this kept happening throughout the day. I slept on it and hoped for the best the following day.
Unfortunately, the same thing was happening the next day and every day even till now. It happens for many different games I’ve tried, all which yield the same results:
WoW – Casting times, looting, walking, moving things around in the inventory, accepting and turning in quests; all this makes the experience unplayable.
Starcraft 2 – delayed response on all commands causing frames to squeeze everything in while issuing commands. The ping spikes fluctuate up and down it seems.
Diablo 3 – All mobs skip around on screen, and character gets stuck in animations only for all the frames to catch up shortly thereafter. Pings show anywhere from 75ms – 1500ms
Path of Exile – As if the servers weren’t hammered enough from the start of the new league, the latency spikes in this game are the most prevalent and noticeable. Nigh unplayable.
Minecraft - Placing down blocks and mining blocks comes with delays of all sorts. Moving in a straight line shows how unstable everything is.
Wolcen – the third ARPG I’ve tried and as above, the results are the same as the others.
All of these programs had the same pattern repeat over and over. Starting off with a ‘normal’ connection which worsened. Sometimes this would take 5-10 minutes for the ping to start increasing, sometimes ping would be high right off the bat.
Here is my setup:
1 Computer Wired to modem
3 Computers Wireless (2.4ghz or 5ghz) – also to modem – I don’t have a router yet; was planning on buying one, but then ran into this whole issue.
Gigabit down, 30mbps UP
At first I thought all this was isolated to the wired PC (the main PC). All these issues manifest themselves on the other 3 wireless connections. Same programs, same issues with the same parameters.
What I’ve done so far:
Speedtest.net, fast.com have reported somewhat normal numbers: ~840-950mbps down and 25-30 up with a 9-11 ms ping. There are times though that the reported numbers are wildly lower though; hovering in the 40mbps-200mbps down. I can’t explain that.
I’ve reached out to my ISP multiple times regarding all this. They sent out a technician on Thursday March 12. He thought that the connectors on the junction box at the side of my house were aged, and so he replaced them and assured me all would be fine That was the only thing he really did other than checking out the connection speed of the network. Of course 30 minutes after he left, the problems started rearing its head again. The ISP has run a full gamut of tests on their end and have reported no problems that they can see at all. Pings have reported normal, no dropped/lost packets. They will be sending a “network specialist’ sometime next week.
I’ve run full antispyware, adware, malware, virus tests on the machines hoping to make sure that there isn’t some intrusion which is causing the problem. All results have come back negative, but I’m not versed enough as to whether these “complete” scan tests are enough.
Thinking at first that it was limited to my main wired PC (i7 3930k @ 4.0ghz, GTX 1080ti, EVO 500 SSD), I thought it was the SSD failing. Running the Samsung Magician diagnostic tool reported everything as fine. Obviously, after testing the other wireless pc’s (approx. same specs) showed that this problem was not isolated to just the main wired rig.
I thought maybe some other device in the household was sucking up a large amount of bandwidth, so I disconnected every other device in the house
-Nvidia Shield
- PS4 pro
-PS4 Slim
- 4 Switches(1 wired, 3 wireless)
-Ipads, iphones,
- Roku stick
- Roku TV
Pretty much everything connected wireless or hardwired in. I isolated it so that it was ONLY the main PC that was connected. That didn’t change a thing
The main thing I’m concerned about are not the speeds, as I’m clearly getting everything as advertised. It’s the pings that are making everything completely unplayable. Why this all of a sudden happened this week beats me. I’ve lived in this house for almost 8 years now and I’ve never experience this issue before. The ISP cant’ find anything at all on their end which might be causing the issue. The best they can do is send out their network specialist, and I’ll have to show him the issues I’m having first hand.
If anyone has any information that they can point me to, that would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps I’m missing something basic and hopefully it’s just something I’ve overlooked.
Thanks for reading, be safe!
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