Before I shoot myself... (ping issues)

Virgin Media has been the most frustrating, headache-inducing internet experience for me since attempting to play over a 56k connection. Before I leave a suicide note in the form of an expletive-strewn rant on the complaints board of this forum, perhaps some of you can offer suggestions as to how I can fix this ping-related issue that has me leaving dents in my walls.

I am currently living in Bolton (if that's relevant). I am using the 10mb service as that's all I can afford right now. I am using the 'Super' Hub, though I have a spare Linksys WRT54GL lying around if it can in any way be useful. In my previous (Preston) address, this service was not great, but barely adequate, providing my housemates weren't raping it with bittorrent.

Here however, the story is different. On any game (I have tested with quite a few), when looking at the server list, I will have a good ping to plenty of servers, around 30ms. I idle on irc.quakenet.org and observe a similar ping there. However, the moment I start playing a game, ping will jump to 200-400ms and stay there. This affects any game, and my IRC ping will jump up at the same time. When I leave the game, ping drops back to normal after a few minutes.

This is not always the case, but about 95% of the time it holds true. So my question is, [censored] is going on? This is not my only beef with Virgin (don't let me get started) but if I can fix this one I will endure until I am able to afford something better or move elsewhere.

Oh, and please, do not ask me to call Virgin unless you have a 100% guaranteed solution that I can dictate to one of their support monkeys. I spent 3 months destroying my sanity in that hellhole and I'm not going back without a good reason and a flamethrower.

May be worth posting on their support forum:

http://community.virginmedia.com/

Also check modem config, posting your upstream and downstream info and the config log. May just be a case of over utilisation as many experience.
When your internet is playing up pathping www.bbc.co.uk will give you some indiication as where the slow down is (usually virgins side).

My knowledge of cable is not great (I'm sure someone else will answer you), but it sounds like an over subscribed UBR - or just plain old contention. You are on a saturated segment of the VM network, and the effects of this are surfacing as high latency.

You didn't mention if the latency effects your game play. They could be giving low priority to ICMP pings, so you're not actually getting any slow downs with gaming, but if sending normal pings whilst playing your game, you will.

Also, the act of actually playing a game means sending traffic out (you probably send less when you're idle). If this rate exceeds your upload speed, it makes sense you will start to see ping times fall to the floor as that is then the bottle neck on your connection.

If it wasn't affecting my gameplay, I wouldn't be here - I don't care much about download speeds provided it's better than 4 or 5mb/s, I'm not a big downloader, but trying to shoot in QL with ping more than 90 is difficult; over 130 nearly impossible. I consider your (mixt's) theory likely; but you haven't mentioned any solutions - are you saying there are none? I am a gamer, and low latency is paramount to me.

do a tracert to your game provider. You will then see where the delay is happening. How to fix it, well thats the question. Could you place a tracert on this board

whats the upload on the 10mb? 1mb if they apply the same 10-1 rule as 30mb

if 1 mb then try some up speed test, its a silm chance but if thoughput is lower than 1mb (way lower) then joining a game could be maxing upspeed which kills ping.

this is my ping plus two other old ip's that its still pinging, apart from the kids getting home bleep at 4.15 the rest of night this has been a idle connection, i thought the 100mb upgrades might improve latency in my city but they havent as yet

My Broadband Ping
2nd Broadband Ping
3rd Broadband Ping

Edited by deleted (Wed 12-Oct-11 20:26:11)

Quake and other FPS do not need anything like 1Mbps, should run fine with 128Kbps since most fps only need about 50 to 60Kbps.

Running with voice enabled can add to the load obviously

Yes, like I said the headline download speed isn't what I'm taking issue with, purely the latency. Further testing has revealed that 95% of the latency is in the first hop. I'll save a tracert the next time the issue crops up.

Edited by deleted (Fri 14-Oct-11 17:49:25)

If it's the first hop, this does suggest it's UBR over utilisation.

tracert quakelive.com

Tracing route to quakelive.com [50.23.229.123]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 270 ms 278 ms 241 ms 10.87.16.1
2 103 ms 9 ms 6 ms oldh-cam-1a-v103.network.virginmedia.net [80.5.165.73]
3 54 ms 67 ms 57 ms manc-core-1a-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [195.182.175.65]
4 113 ms 179 ms 209 ms manc-bb-1a-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.1]
5 216 ms 95 ms 111 ms manc-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.187.178]
6 12 ms 15 ms 18 ms tele-ic-3-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [212.43.163.70]
7 106 ms 105 ms 130 ms 45-236-228-213.packetexchange.net [213.228.236.45]
8 184 ms 187 ms 179 ms be-11-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.84.205]
9 293 ms 375 ms 475 ms pos-0-0-0-0-pe01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.86.26]
10 534 ms 470 ms 439 ms softlayer-pe01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net [75.149.228.94]
11 304 ms 160 ms 128 ms ae7.bbr01.eq01.wdc02.networklayer.com [173.192.18.194]
12 224 ms 227 ms 232 ms ae0.bbr01.tl01.atl01.networklayer.com [173.192.18.153]
13 297 ms 239 ms 261 ms ae13.bbr02.eq01.dal03.networklayer.com [173.192.18.134]
14 264 ms 303 ms 267 ms ae6.dar01.sr01.dal05.networklayer.com [50.97.18.195]
15 318 ms 262 ms 287 ms po1.fcr01.sr01.dal05.networklayer.com [173.192.118.131]
16 288 ms 195 ms 192 ms 50.23.229.123-static.reverse.softlayer.com [50.23.229.123]

Trace complete.

tracert bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 479 ms 519 ms 455 ms 10.87.16.1
2 489 ms 584 ms 625 ms oldh-cam-1a-v103.network.virginmedia.net [80.5.165.73]
3 644 ms 609 ms 637 ms manc-core-1a-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [195.182.175.65]
4 633 ms 668 ms 532 ms manc-bb-1a-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.1]
5 635 ms 560 ms 120 ms glfd-bb-1b-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.146]
6 133 ms 129 ms 132 ms glfd-tmr-1-ae5-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.159.46]
7 243 ms 285 ms 293 ms tcl5-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.185.78]
8 447 ms 429 ms 483 ms 212.58.239.249
9 214 ms 141 ms 83 ms 212.58.238.149
10 287 ms 259 ms 339 ms virtual-vip-231.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]


Trace complete.

ping 192.168.0.1

Pinging 192.168.0.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

Ping statistics for 192.168.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

As you can see, my ping is like a rollercoaster. It will do this for several minutes at a time, then stop, with no pattern to it. This can happen at any time of day, any day of the week.

Sometimes it's fine and won't spike at all.

Edited by deleted (Sat 29-Oct-11 09:36:33)

Look at your first hop pings....10.87.16.1

Download a copy of WinMTR and run that against the quakelive.com address and see what that shows

nothing unusual for VM.

Place bets on over-utilisation! Best thing to do is post on the virginmedia support forum and see if they can escalate - if it is congestion.
I wouldnt hold your breathe on a fix date though they seem to change with the wind

during a period when the issue was present:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.87.16.1 - 13 | 65 | 57 | 7 | 253 | 629 | 37 |
|oldh-cam-1a-v103.network.virginmedia.net - 45 | 36 | 20 | 0 | 89 | 326 | 11 |
|manc-core-1a-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net - 80 | 24 | 5 | 0 | 208 | 249 | 125 |
|manc-bb-1a-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net - 80 | 24 | 5 | 0 | 229 | 274 | 255 |
|manc-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net - 80 | 24 | 5 | 0 | 194 | 281 | 98 |
| tele-ic-3-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net - 80 | 24 | 5 | 0 | 173 | 282 | 282 |
| 45-236-228-213.packetexchange.net - 83 | 23 | 4 | 0 | 243 | 274 | 274 |
| be-11-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net - 95 | 20 | 1 | 0 | 264 | 264 | 264 |
|pos-0-0-0-0-pe01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net - 87 | 22 | 3 | 0 | 224 | 241 | 208 |
| No response from host - 100 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|50.23.229.123-static.reverse.softlayer.com - 0 | 97 | 97 | 127 | 329 | 763 | 131 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

Edited by deleted (Sun 30-Oct-11 10:47:39)

and a period when it was not:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.87.16.1 - 14 | 61 | 53 | 5 | 40 | 227 | 10 |
|oldh-cam-1a-v103.network.virginmedia.net - 45 | 34 | 19 | 0 | 48 | 235 | 17 |
|manc-core-1a-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net - 79 | 23 | 5 | 0 | 30 | 73 | 10 |
|manc-bb-1a-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net - 52 | 31 | 15 | 0 | 61 | 332 | 26 |
|manc-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net - 63 | 27 | 10 | 0 | 58 | 228 | 22 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| po1.fcr01.sr01.dal05.networklayer.com - 95 | 19 | 1 | 0 | 366 | 366 | 366 |
|50.23.229.123-static.reverse.softlayer.com - 0 | 94 | 94 | 126 | 154 | 355 | 135 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

The worst part of this is that joining a game frequently seems to TRIGGER the issue. I have a ping monitor on my IRC client, and it often idles at 16-25ms to QuakeNet. I join a game and it immediately hits 100-200ms, sometimes more. Leave the game and it drops back to normal.

This isn't always the case, sometimes I'll see ping spikes without my doing anything at all, and sometimes (rarely these days) I can play a game with no problem. It just happens too often for it to be a coincidence.