Zen's latency

Just wondering if anybody has experienced an increase in their latency recently. I have the line on fast path and was getting good pings but I've had an unexplained spike in latency that hasn't corrected itself.

Here's an example of the increase, while the ADSL was still connected.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/df629242c8f...

Previous:
2 13 ms 14 ms 13 ms losubs.subs.dsl1.mbr-roch.zen.net.uk [62.3.82.17]

Current:
2 27 ms 27 ms 29 ms losubs.subs.dsl1.mbr-roch.zen.net.uk [62.3.82.17]

This isn't the first time this has happened but it doesn't seem to be resolving itself as it did in past cases.

Here's another oddity. The pings decreased in ~10ms increments until back to normal. The first drop was caused by a reconnection to get a better gateway, although the original gateway started off at the >50ms mark and dropped down over a period of a few minutes until it hit the ~20ms mark, all without any reconnection. It seemed a little bit like (alright, exactly like) the connection profile was set on auto interleave and a burst of errors has caused it to increase the depth, although I've been told that it's not. It happened a bit too quickly to be clearly seen on the chart.

As a gamer, I value a connection with low latency and given that I use fast path, I value it over speed. However, the latency I'm receiving at the moment is worse than I'd expect to receive on your average interleaved connection.

So, my question is, has anybody else experienced similar oddities or have any possible explanation of what's going on? I really can't think of anything apart from the connection possibly being mistakenly on auto as I believe it may have been prior to my move to Zen (it'd explain a lot as the same behaviour is visible in my last ISP's monitor). I've seen the behavior of the system when a line has a burst of errors after moving to Zen when the line was set 'back' to auto. Doing anything intensive with the connection at that point triggered a ~10ms hike in latency.

Finally, it may sound like a conspiracy theory (it's not ) but this sort of thing seems to always happen at around 10am. I can produce a number of monitor graphs showing drastic shifts in latency at around 10am. Complete coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Sorry for the slightly incoherent post and thanks!

Edited by deleted (Fri 08-Apr-11 19:11:25)

I've had the same problem on and off over the past few weeks/month but it's gotten better over the last week or so.

Ping is fine 'till 7:30-8PM, when it used to jump from ~60 to 100+ (sometimes average of 400 near 8PM). Then after 10PM it would slowly return to normal.

Been OK for the last week or two, with occasional spikes (in the evening). I always used to have Interleaving turned on, but I presume (by looking at the graph) it must have disabled itself then re-enabled.

Here's a graph from 22 March, showing a massive spike that happened instantly after EastEnders finished (connection was hardly being used from 8PM-9PM)

http://i.imgur.com/VefXL.png


Here's where you can see the jump around the middle of week 13 (Interleaving back on?)
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/9589/pingwanmonth...

I had the same problem around half a year ago, hike of around 10ms that didn't want to go down for quite some time. I asked support to turn interleaving off instead of Auto and my ping went back to normal. Maybe it was a coincidence I don't know.

Lately though I've not had any problems so I can't offer any advice on that sorry.

What I'm curious about, is there different levels of 'interleaving' when set to Auto or is Auto just detection of on or off, 1 and 0? The reason I ask is my sync has gone down since manually setting interleaving off yet my ping hasn't changed from when it was Auto.

I hope you don't think I'm hijacking your post I'm just curious if tech support mentioned anything like this.

As a gamer myself it's quite frustrating isn't it, especially when you just have to sit and wait it out, especially when a lot of people don't give you much sympathy on the matter

There are different interleaving depths that the auto system can set. They're in increments of ~8ms to the best of my knowledge.

Yep, it is indeed frustrating though, especially since there's a logical explanation out there somewhere. It's not some dark magic that's beyond control as some might try and have you believe.

I don't care so much about speed as I do about latency. If that weren't the case, I could be getting better value elsewhere. I've even set the router's SNR to 20dB in the hope that if there's still some sort of error correction magic going on that it'll eventually stop. We'll see but hey, it's worth a try.

In addition to that, I ensure I'm connected to one of the Manchester or Rochdale gateways as some of the others (Leeds to name one) produce some pretty horrid latency (talking 50ms first hop on 'fast path').

Thumbs up:
7 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms www1.multiplay.co.uk [85.236.96.22]

Not so much:
10 48 ms 47 ms 51 ms www.multiplay.co.uk [85.236.96.68]

The first time I made a request about this, the problem magically went away after they said they'd get on it. I'm not sure if it was luck or if they actually did something which was later undone (the line profile was changed from fast to auto and back to fast again).

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Apr-11 06:10:56)

Interesting, thanks. I don't want to risk going back to Auto even though my ping was just as good as it is now on 'off'.

Since 21CN I've always been connected to Manchester even though I'm closer to Leeds. I don't think I've ever noticed been connected to Leeds gateway since ADSL2 for some reason.

We don't have 21cn infrastructure in Leeds, just 20cn. Being in the north you should therefore typically only connect to our Manchester gateways.

Carl

Cool, thanks for the info.

On a slightly related note, is OP or anyone getting a slow response to servers lately? Not a higher latency but a quite a delay before a server responds at all.

Pings are fine, connection seems normal, browsing normal... just pings are hanging for a good 10 seconds

Even when you ping the IP address?

Sounds like DNS.

Try using Googls DNS on the PC/MAC and test the connection, then do the same for Our DNS. Once done can you let me know the results please.

I'll get back to you on this. It could be the software causing the ping delay, seems okay from windows