Periodic Ping Spikes

[Sveri]

Hi all,

I've recently been having trouble with my Cox internet, and I'm at a loss of what to do to fix it. Basically, I will periodically get big lag spikes with my internet. It's only really noticeable when I'm in a game, or when I'm doing a ping test/tracert, but it's definitely a pain when in-game. It happens probably every 15-30 seconds.

I've had a Cox technician come out and check everything, and it all looks good. Speed tests turn back great results with low ping and high speeds, everything outside at the cable box is set right. But something seems to be tripping up the signal at some point. Tracerts have low ping until after the ISP, so I feel like it's not anything on my end, but I'm no expert.

I rent a Cox modem/router, and I've had them replace it once to see if that fixed the problem. It did for a couple of weeks, but now the ping spikes are back. I guess it's possible that it's gone bad in two weeks? My previous modem/router I had with them lasted about 4-5 months before I started experiencing these spikes.

The cables ran in my apartment are also very old (most likely 30+ years). The technician said rerunning those may help, but I'd hate to go through all that hassle with the apartment to get that fixed if it won't really fix it.

Any ideas? I'd really appreciate any help.

ETA: I should also note that these ping spikes occur with both wired and wirelessly connections. My computer is always has a wired connection, but I checked my roommate's computer to see if it did the same thing there.

[Zenfoldor]

Simplest thing first. Have you tried it with another computer and your wireless turned off? Many, many times, in these cases, when you have intermittent spikes, its an adware program like Steam or Windows Update, trying to do things "automatically" for you, and/or a spouse/neighbor watching youtube videos off your wireless.

Here's the thing, in WoW, for gaming, you are very sensitive to lag spikes. Also, games tend to over-report lag spikes as well. In WoW, for example, a 10 second lag spike might take 260 seconds to bring your average back down to what you are actually seeing. Because of these reporting methods, we see latency the average user would not.

Latency on your end, isn't necessarily caused by throttled bandwidth. It can also be caused by lack of solid storm control or QoS on a switch or router, which basically makes it a LAN issue. In other words, you don't have to be throttling your ISP side bandwidth plan to see increased intermittent latency. Any activity on your LAN has the potential, depending on your wiring, to disrupt latency.

So I guess, best practice, is to make sure its not your computer, your programs, your net usage, or your network usage. Best way to test that is to connect a wire directly into your modem with wireless off, on a different computer with a ping -t based testing solution and just monitor it, and see if latency spikes at all during the looped ping test.

If you never spike above, say 22, for half an hour, then you are having a local issue or an intermediate routing issue. Local issue, easy to diagnose and find, just troubleshoot and fix it. If its a routing issue, you can choose to use a 3rd party VPN type program if there is a server near you and take that route. As I understand(but best to investigate) these don't violate ToS for games they work with.

Hope this helped.

Edit: I noticed you check your room-mates computer to see if it did the same thing. Good. However, make sure all other computers are unplugged, including yours. Then try it with yours. For all you know, it could be malware on his computer, which would persist if only his was connected. Gotta make sure to go about it scientifically. If you have eliminated all possibility of it being a local issue, then move forward knowing that. If you know anyone else with your ISP, try it on their end. There is always a very high chance its local though. Just gotta go in knowing that, and also knowing that if its not local and its not mainstream(small latency variations), it may not get fixed anytime soon.