ping and internet speed

Hello forum, i would like to know if ping in a computer game is proportional to internet speed or is it proportional to distance (servers). I want to play some games online but most of the time it doesnt work because the servers are in America or Europe so what do i need to do for my ping to be high (good) rather than low (bad)

hello pcnoobsdc

ill try to explain this using a road analogy, so here goes

ping is the time it takes from you send a request to a server untill you get a reply back.
the packets have to travel from you, reach the server, the server issues a reply, which in turn has to get to you

so, the lower the ping the faster the server reply comes back. lower is better

how long ping time you got will depend on a few factors:

1. where in the world the server is placed.
light in fibers can only travel so fast, so if it is a server half way across the globe things will take the time it takes.
you cannot make it go faster. (unless you can beat the laws of physics, in which case you will be filthy rich ;))

compare it to roads. if you have to drive 10000km and the maximum speed your car can go is 200000km/s (normal speed of light in a fiber give or take some), it will take 50ms to get to the other end, and then 50ms back again. in other words a ping time of 100ms. this is quite a normal ping time when going across continents


2. if any part of the network is congested with other traffic things might be slow
if you are driving on a road in rush hour all the other traffic is slowing things down. typically happens when people come home from work and start surfing

3. if the server at the other end is very busy.
if the server is busy it might downprioritize ping traffic. this doesnt mean it is slow, it just is prioritizing the important stuff instead of answering to ping requests


4. how your internet provider route traffic.
internet providers exchange traffic with other internet providers and also with third party companies which owns fibers between eg: usa and japan, usa and europe and so forth
say you live in a bay and want to play with your friend who live across the bay. you can see his house.
still you have to drive a long way round to visit him/her. the same thing can happen on the internet.

your isp sends traffic back to the main office in another city. from there it goes on a road to yet another city further away before it heads back to the other side of the bay.

this is also hard to do anything with. it is just how the road structure for your isp is laid out

to troubleshoot problems i would use a tool called traceroute

what this does is check what "cities" your traffic passes by and if there is any are which is congested/busy
here is a typical traceroute done from the pc. it shows where traffic goes from my computer to a game server in dublin
 

number 1 is my home router. if i use wifi and it is congested by neighbors or severe useage from others in my household this number will be high. anything below 5ms is acceptable. if you have a high number here and use wifi you might want to switch to cabled network instead

number 2 is my isp's local equipment response time. this is usually placed in an area near you.
if this has a high number it might mean that there is alot of other traffic from other customers that is connected to the same equipment or it means that it is busy and doesnt bother with replying to your request.

in my case i know there are a lot of other customers on the same equipment so the delay is not unexpected. normally on adsl i would expect around an 8 to 16ms delay due to an error correcting going on in the adsl system called interleaving.
sometimes isps offer something called fastpath where they turn off interleaving. it might lower your ping but at other costs like many errors on the transmissions. this can be even worse than the added delay because packets get lost. that is a big no no in gaming

number 3 is the first node in the main office of my isp. it is 1600km away and 25ms time to get from where i am to there and back is around that time

number 4 to 8 are internal nodes in my isps network. they are transfering traffic to the peer they exchange traffic abroad with

number 9 is the first node in the peering companys network. this company is called level3.

number 10 and 11 is the peering companys exit node in dublin. now if you think a straight line from oslo to dublin you would expect a delay for 1200km, so around 20ms.
then why is it 40ms?
its the bay problem again. traffic doesnt go in a straight line. the fiber might run through sweden, denmark, germany, holland, england, ireland. so 40ms extra time it is

number 12 is the first node in the network of the isp that provide the game server with internet access

number 13 and 14 are the game server companys own equipment



now, let me show an example of problems you can see

 

here you can see that number 6 adds a 200ms delay. this is caused at this exact point because the delays after it are also 200ms higher
this means there is a serious traffic jam at that point.
i would show the traceroute to the isp and complain that it destroys your gaming experience


another one is packetloss where some packets are lost at one point on the road.
to measure this you would need to monitor ping over time. a good tool for that is eg: pingplotter.com

it will give a graphical overview of loss percentage and pingtimes over a given period of time


now, the biggest problem isnt all this. it is if other people use your internet line at the same time you are playing games

if your bro is watching netflix he might be killing the capacity of your internet line, especially if you have adsl
if he is torrenting.. even worse
if you are using wifi and others (neighbors or household members) are also using it

these are also things you can do something about

try other wifi channels to minimize interference. when one person on the wifi is talking others must be silent.
and this goes if your neighbor uses the same channel as your wifi. if the neighbor talks you have to wait
use a cable to remove this problem

about torrenting and netflixing. something can be done about it, but unless you are the boss in the household you might have problems with stopping them doing it


best of luck to you

tfn

hello thx for your reply i read most of it and i think i get it more or less. So the answer is no server is not proportional to internet speed but if my isp servers have a high ping then it can affect connectivity, correct? So  how do i do the tracert command to the game called ''Microvolts'' and can you give an example from your side so i can show you mine? I always get my player freezing and disconnect from the server. By the way im living in Africa now, South West. I'm assuming that the game's servers are too far away correct?

Edited by pcnoobsdc, 04 December 2016 - 10:30 AM.

hello again

the tracert command is something you run on your own pc. for it to work you need to know what to traceroute

if you dont know the server ip you will have to find something close to the location of the server to trace

luckily the server locations for microvolts are revealed here:
http://forum.microvolts.com/forum/showthread.php?136365-Servers-location&p=2672594&viewfull=1#post2672594

so. you need to do a traceroute to something in frankfurt germany and/or virginia usa


this is an ip that should be in frankfurt
keep in mind that it might not use the same "road" when leaving the transit to germany as the connection to the gameserver itself.
but it will give you a general idea

btw.. here is how to open a cmd prompt to run the command in:
https://www.google.no/search?client=opera&q=microvolts+game&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=how+to+open+cmd&tbm=vid

 

in the black box that pops up, just write the text and then press enter
tracert 145.253.248.206 

it will look like this:
C:\Users\Bruker>tracert 145.253.248.206

as you can see i get around 74ms ping time to germany and 158ms pingtime to usa
step 15 and 16 on the trace to usa is also normal. these routers dont answer to ping.
probably because of security reasons


if you live in africa this might be why your gaming experience on servers in europe and usa are non optimal

do the traceroutes and post your results here and ill have a look at it

hth!

tfn
 

 

 

  7    10 ms     5 ms     4 ms  192.168.162.18

  8   245 ms   179 ms     *     lis2-br1-po1-0-0.cprm.net [195.8.10.241]

 

 

  7     *       19 ms     4 ms  192.168.162.18

  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.

  9   108 ms   119 ms   124 ms  be2498.rcr21.opo01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.56.13]

 

things look fine up to jump number 7

it seems your isp has better peering agreement to exchange traffic to usa than to europe
think of it as having a better motorway to go to usa than to germany

you can see this as the usa traffic uses cogentco which is one of the bigger companies out there
the one transfering traffic between portugal and germany i havent heard of before

the ping to portugal is 80ms higher when going to germany than to usa.

still both have very high ping times and are as such difficult to play on
if you have packet loss they will be virtually impossible to play on with bungee jumping back and forth, trigger lag etc

if you want to find out if you have packet loss, pingplotter.com has a free 14 day trial.
it should be enough to find more information

hth

tfn