In reply to a post by WWWombat:

You probably want to see this page of TBB graphs:
http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

I'm trying to find some recent O2 ping graphs to see how it compares.

Would you stress more importance on the maximum latency or the average latency?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

That was my point . That you are exactly the opposite from doomed. Note on the graphs page that WWWombat has just given you the link to that there is no packet loss.

Woooo

I had a look, the maximum latency between 8pm-12am spikes well over 100ms in some graphs, but will let you know on the 31st of May on my results..

In reply to a post by narz:

Would you stress more importance on the maximum latency or the average latency?

If average latency stay low then it indicates the jitter is occasional. If maximum and average go high then the jitter is more frequent. But either way, yellow indicates jitter when green (minimum) stays low.

Given that these Plusnet graphs have shows the same patterns since Dec/Jan it would appear it's the norm for 40ms jitter in peak times and I don't think Plusnet consider that "outside design specifications" or a fault. The likes of Sky and BE generally show green with no or low yellow or blue (i.e. no/low jitter), 24/7, assuming an idle line.

Edited by Oliver341 (Wed 22-May-13 17:55:41)

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

The likes of Sky and BE generally show green with no or low yellow or blue (i.e. no/low jitter), 24/7, assuming an idle line.

Interesting. Is it safe to conclude Sky/Be are superior? (costs aside)

In reply to a post by narz:

Interesting. Is it safe to conclude Sky/Be are superior? (costs aside)

Hard to say. You can't just go by BQM, but if I was a gamer I'd probably opt for an ISP with a flat green line 24/7 over one that isn't, all other things being equal. Sky hasn't been without issues, there have been reports of half speed fibre thoughput for some time now, which may or may not be fixed for those affected.

It is rather hard to conclude whether Sky/BE's gaming experience is "superior" based on graphs made from non-gaming packets.

First, I'd have to see a whole load of Sky/BE graphs to compare.

Then (like the point made earlier), I'd have to know whether the graphs (which are for ICMP Ping packets) match behaviour for real UDP and TCP gaming packets.

If PN queue ping packets at a lower level than gaming packets (which are in the titanium queue), then PN's real gaming behaviour is going to be better than that seen in their graphs.

Then I'd need to understand Sky & BE's queuing policy. It is undoubtedly different.

Thanks for the info lads.

i'm building a BQM graph of my current O2 line before I switch to plus.net next week and will compare results. Will come back to update!

Just realised that it is a little harder to get wireshark logs of the WAN ping packets, when the router auto-responds to these.

I guess you need a PC plugged directly into the modem, running PPPoE itself.

ICMP traffic should be (and is) in Titanium queue.

I'm mostly concerned about seeing any increases in the baseline green section of the graph. That is likely to represent some sort of contention or failure between the TBB BQM servers and the router responding. We often see a baseline rise there when the router is busy doing other stuff rather than responding to the ping, or when there is exchange level congestion. It also increased when we had a device issue earlier in the year. (lots of threads about that over on community), but that was really dramatic and obvious!

Re: the peak time lift we see in the average and maximum latency? We've had a look and we think we've worked it out. Basically a lot of our traffic is gold traffic now and when there is a lot of gold traffic going through the devices we see a very small delay in completing the pass through of the gold traffic before returning to the titanium queue. What this looks like it means is the odd ICMP packet taking 20ms or so longer than average (representing the maximum latency increase) This occasional delay is enough to push the average by a couple of ms at peak. When you combine this increase with people stressing their routers at peak (after all, this is when you use it!) you start seeing those little rises.

We've quite a few gamers here in PN on our normal Unlimited product who come and punch me in the head if they see performance issues and I've checked with them numerous times and they've never seen any issues. I don't like seeing the rises on the graphs though because they do look worse than they actually appear to be!

Either way, this stuff is my (and my teams) bread and butter. If you are experiencing performance issues, yell and we'll be all over it.

Edited by deleted (Thu 23-May-13 09:41:59)

KellyD thank you for the reassuring input. I have to agree the graphs definitely do not provide the whole picture.

My O2 line at the moment is trouble free in latency and throughput, but this is what my graph at the moment looks like!

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/831a87a979b...