Forum Discussion

Bettymartin's avatar
Bettymartin
Tuning in
6 months ago

High Latency and Packet loss for gaming and websites.

Hi, 

Since about February I've been experiencing very high latency in online games such as World of Warcraft (pings of up to circa 14k, huge lag spikes every couple of minutes and frequent disconnects which make gaming more or less impossible). I have started seeing similar issues with other online games recently too and websites where a connection is maintained (roll20.net for example) often lag out and take time to load.

The issue exists for me on both wired Ethernet and Wi-fi and exists on 2 separate PC's in my house, one running Win 11 and one running Win 10. 

If I switch to a VPN, the issue resolves and I no longer suffer latency and lag spikes so I believe my home equipment is sound. Using a VPN permanently is not a viable solution however and I need this resolved.

I have been running a BQM graph for some time posted here below but it doesn't indicate significant issues that I can see.

I have also run traceroutes through both WinMTR and Pingplotter and the issue seems to consistently begin at a hop labelled "aor.uk-lon03a-ri1.network.virginmedia.net" where I frequently start to see up to 100% packet loss on the route to whichever server I'm trying to trace.

I have had an engineer call out, he checked all my equipment and the local exchange on my street and confirmed all was working correctly and also ran tests from my pc to confirm the router is operating properly. The router has also been replaced about 6 months ago as I believed at the time that may have been the issue but the problem has persisted.

I am on a 1Gbit plan with a Hub5. I do not use modem mode.

Everything I'm seeing indicates a problem with the particular network hop so I'm hoping someone can take a look for me.

<a title="Broadband Ping" href="https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/bdca13531fcbaf42dd7fc257708c2371d258617d"><img alt="My Broadband Ping - Home" src="https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/thumb/bdca13531fcbaf42dd7fc257708c2371d258617d.png" /></a>  

Thanks in advance

 

 

Lag spikes
latency
packet loss

9 Replies

Sort By
  • Bettymartin's avatar
    Bettymartin
    Tuning in
    6 months ago

    Struggling with the BQM link, if someone could provide a link to instructions, I'll try and include again. Thanks in advance!

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta
    6 months ago

    "pings of up to circa 14k"   

    Is that 14,000 ms ?   If Yes, how is that being measured ?

    • Bettymartin's avatar
      Bettymartin
      Tuning in
      6 months ago

      Yes, 14000ms. It's measured through an in game addon which measures latency. It updates once every 30 seconds so it's not an exact science but to put it into realistic terms I'm frequently waiting 5 - 10 seconds for a response having pressed an in game button when a spike occurs.

      • Akua_A's avatar
        Akua_A
        Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
        6 months ago

        Hi Bettymartin 

        Welcome to our community forums and sorry for the delay in getting to you. We can understand the frustration caused by connectivity issues and we want to best help. We have run some tests and we can see ongoing issues and some hub data issues. We are sending you a private message to look into this. Please keep an eye out for an envelope at the top right corner of your Forum page. Let me know if you have any issues locating this. 

        Thanks,

  • Bettymartin's avatar
    Bettymartin
    Tuning in
    6 months ago

    Quick update. Obviously there's been no reply from mods to this thread - a shame - but I received an e-mail from Virgin today proudly telling me they had spotted a problem with my connection and had fixed it overnight.

    Nothing has been fixed, my issues persist. I would be very grateful for a mod response to this please.

    • Ayisha_B's avatar
      Ayisha_B
      Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
      6 months ago

      Hi Bettymartin 

      I can see my colleague is assisting you further in relation to this via PM.

      Thanks for your patience.

  • Odynson90's avatar
    Odynson90
    Joining in
    17 days ago

    Hi there, I'm so sorry for digging up an old thread, however, I seem to have solved my issue, which seems similar to yours. I too play world of warcraft, i've seen spikes of 400-1600ms on Home and World. Full drop outs. Stutters and freezes, you name it.

    Engineers have been out. I've had a new router. All sorts.

    I was rummaging through my Hub5x settings (2gig), MTU was set at 2000! Which would have been from factory (or the engineer did it when setting it up), the cap for this is typically 1500.

    I went on my PC, command prompt and typed this in. "Ping www.homenetworkgeek.com -f -l 2000"

    Minus the speech marks.

    It returned that 4 packets were sent, none received. 100% Packet loss. CMD indicated the packets required fragmenting. This tends to happen when the MTU size is too high, it takes forever to "fill the packet" and then to send it, if there's errors, it takes an age to do it again.
    Smaller MTU sizes allow for smaller packets of data to be sent quickly. I lowered the MTU number (2000) in the line and repeated the command, starting at 1500, lowering incrementally by 10 until it returned that my packets no longer needed fragmenting, indicated by 0% loss.

    My MTU is now set within the hub at 1498, (1470 was my optimal MTU and you then add 28, 20 bytes are reserved for the IP header and 8 bytes are needed for the ICMP Echo Request header)

    My ms in-game is now 18ms, down from 980 earlier this evening.

    In writing this, I realise you may have resolved this by now, or even left VM. But Hopefully this can help someone.

    Best,
    Dan

    • IPFreely's avatar
      IPFreely
      Fibre optic
      17 days ago
      Odynson90 wrote:

      Smaller MTU sizes allow for smaller packets of data to be sent quickly.

      That isn't how it works, dude. It's a maximum not a target. Small packets are small because they've a beginning and an end and not much in between: when they're complete they're sent full MTU, or in case of WoW MSS as it uses TCP, or not. WoW stuff used to risk being delayed by Nagle's Algorithm but that was turned off when the 'optimize network for speed' was added. 

      Your PC will have a 1500 MTU set ensuring the 2000 isn't an issue. The PC will not try and build anything larger than 1500 bytes. You likely are able to send with a 1472 payload size on the ping whether Hub MTU is 1500 or 2000: this is standard.

      If you had been able to capture a session between you and WoW before it would have had an MSS of at most 1460. 1500-40 byte TCP/IP header. 

      Unclear what was up there, might be a software bug in the Hub but the 2000 MTU doesn't impact you as nothing you're sending has an MTU above 1500. Many other people haven't touched the MTU on their Hub and are fine pointing away from that as the cause but I would need to test and I'm certainly not getting a Nexfibre service connected for that 😁

      • Odynson90's avatar
        Odynson90
        Joining in
        16 days ago

        I appreciate your input. 

        From what I understand from your post is that it didn't matter that I changed it as it wouldn't have done anything anyway? 

        All I'm saying is, the MTU size in the hub's settings was set at 2000, wow and other games were suffering with severe latency and drops outs. I set this to what I calculated my optimum MTU size without fragmenting, 1498, and miraculously my woes are no more?

        I don't believe in freak occurrences/coincidences :')

        My connection issue was resolved immediately upon making this change.

        Dan