Latency spikes

Hi

I have FTTC approx 50/10. Every test available shows an average ping between 7-15ms. According to the monitor, I have almost constant latency spikes between 80-140ms. The buffer bloat results seem to yo-yo accordingly.

I have had constant issues with shots registering in online games for years and believe this to be the reason. I have some sort of [smart/adaptive?] QOS enabled on my relatively expensive ASUS router/modem. The model number escapes me just now. Anyway, I�m hoping that eliminates buffer bloat on my end.

So I guess my question is, where would the slow down be more likely to be occurring, Plusnet, or my local exchange? The latter being 3 miles away in a heavily built up area.

If anybody could post an image of the monitor with a [real world] example of stable latency, that would help me manage my expectations while recording my own over the next few weeks.

Thanks.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/faq/broadband-quality...

Scroll down that page to a series of BQM graphs and there is a nice almost all green one.

Thanks.

So my graph looks similar to the �normal connection� graph, except the yellow spikes climb about 50% higher (average spike being 120-140ms).

Does the monitor show the effect of buffer bloat, as recorded by the TBB speed test? I perhaps wrongly assumed that was the reason for the spikes. It�s difficuot to discern the width [duration] of the spike to a short enough timescale. Does the steady average latency suggest that they must be repeatedly short?

Please could you link to your BQM, and what router do you have?

Some are known to give a regular spike, easily recognised, but I can't remember which routers do.

Link to the BQM is best at this stage

Each pixel is 100 seconds, so yellow may be just 1 or 2 samples (1/second) having higher latency, i.e. if the thin blue line does not move then what you have is jitter and this can be caused by simply loading a web page.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/... is my actual connection from today, the yellow spikes showing when I was busy using the connection, web pages/email/small files today

The long red spike at 2:15pm was a reboot of the router i.e. I pulled the power
Big yellow spike at 7:45pm is me uploading an image to twitter

This is the monitor.

This is the router.

So get up around 6am and household is quiet from 8am to 3:30pm when some gets home from school?

Then busy streaming video or other activities from 8pm and still ongoing now

To know if you have a jitter/latency problem you need to stop using the connection for 30 minutes or so and see when the BQM is still showing variations

Ok will do.

Live graph.

The major batches of yellow are typical of something that is being done on computer equipment in the home, possibly not by yourself though obviously some of it will be.

I doubt if my suggestion of a regular spike applies, as my ASUS RT-N66U doesn't exhibit them. Though there is a possible pattern of regular spikes to about 25ms, with some lost inside the wider patches. Starting with the 42ms just after 2am, then just before 5am, 9:30am; 12:20; just before 3pm, then obliterated.

Whatever problems you are encountering in real use, this is nothing to do with it even if your different model router is doing this spiking.

I hope MrSaffron manages to spot something.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

So get up around 6am and household is quiet from 8am to 3:30pm when some gets home from school?

Then busy streaming video or other activities from 8pm and still ongoing now

To know if you have a jitter/latency problem you need to stop using the connection for 30 minutes or so and see when the BQM is still showing variations

Pretty much spot on.

Looking at the live graph in my previous post, I can tell you that everybody was turned off at midnight (00:03 to be precise) and you can still see spikes. Not sure what could have happened at 4.00am. I will investigate whether anybody left a console on standby, that could have updated itself in the background etc.

What I�m trying to understand is this. If I have a solid average ping of say, 15ms, and a good connection, should I not be able to sustain say, 10Mbps without spiking? Is the spiking down to contention, or as I have tended to suspect, external buffer bloat? Spikes of 120-140ms are very high to my mind, if I�m not actively viewing information in far flung locations. I can reach some servers in New York in 75ms, so I start to wonder about traffic and routing etc.

I understand that a connection can�t be �perfect�, but without a reasonable expectation as to what spikes are normal, it�s difficult to look for patterns in behaviour.