Strange Internet

Craig Prince

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Ok I have been having issues with my internet on multiplayer games there is about a 10 second delay for everything I will do in the game which is really annoying. But my internet itself is fine, I have bad download and upload speeds, but that won't matter in online gaming. Here is my pingtest.



See that should actually be really good for online gaming but for me its not. Could anyone tell me what I should do?
 
What are your internet speeds? I doubt it's small enough to make difference but it does matter if you're slow enough.
 
Normally if you are downloading or someone in your house connect to the internet is downloading it can make a big difference in the speed of your gaming (ping)
 
To get the best response time and lag prevention, your best choice is to use a single wired connection in the network; e.g. connecting to the router directly with a cable and have no one else accessing the network!
 
When you're playing, what are the other computers doing? If they're just on facebook or the like then you should be fine
 
A wired connection would improve connection stability yes, but as celegorm implies - the actions of the other machines in the network at the time will influence your performance much more.

Unfortunately modern routers have more RAM in them than they used to, and I say unfortunately because more RAM in your router actually makes your connection quality decrease. This is all due to the nature of buffering.

By definition, larger buffers 'hold on' to data for a longer time period, so if other machines are using the connection at the same time as you (or your own machine is doing more than one thing - i.e. downloading windows updates or AV signatures while playing games) then more of your game data sits in these buffers waiting for the other traffic to be processed before reaching your computer. Worse still, if this data is sent over a TCP connection and a packet has been dropped en-route it takes even longer to realise (due to the latency introduced by the buffer) and instigate a retransmission. All this results in poor quality performance for all real-time services (the file downloading is also affecting by the gaming connection, but this isn't perceivable to the user like voice and video are). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat for more information on this very fascinating and counterintuitive (at first) subject!

Assuming: your speedtest results are consistent; other users in your network are not active; and the problem persists, an alternative cause for your original problem is that your ISP is throttling game-network traffic. This is fairly easy to achieve and should also be fairly easy to determine if you search for gaming network performance for 'myISP' customers.

Good luck, hope you find a resolution for this (incidentally, there are solutions for the buffer bloat problem also - different buffer allocation and packet ordering algorithms - so if that is your problem, don't assume you're at a dead-end.)
 
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