Diagnosing high pings?

Tek7 (Legacy)

Tek7 (Legacy)

CGA & ToJ President
For the last week or so, I've been getting very high pings to most game servers. It's not just UT2004 servers; I get high pings to Counter-Strike and Natural Selection servers as well.

What free software and/or services could I use to find the reason behind my high ping?

It's entirely possible that the fault lies with my ISP. I'm on hold now waiting for help, but I figured there's a fair chance of someone posting a solution before a human being answers the call. -_-
 
After nearly 30 minutes on hold, I spoke with a Charter tech and he told me the problem is with an AT&T backbone server. About the only thing I can do is force a new IP address and hope that the connection routes around the bugged server.
 
when I worked for my isp they had me running tracert in command menu to see what router or station was down... sometimes that works.
 
Yeah, tracert is the way to go. If you bug your ISP about a crappy ping, they'll blow it off, but if you bug them about a crappy route, they'll try to fix it. That's my experience, anyway.

Plus, when I see an unexpected jump in my pings across the board it's usually a sign that my routing has changed. I used to ping 40 ms to Chicago servers but a few months ago I starting pinging 60. The difference is that instead of routing me through St. Louis and up to Chicago, I now get routed through Dallas.

A teammate of mine, in Utah, used to get 60 ping to Dallas until his routing changed. Now he pings 100 ms because it routes him through San Francisco to get to Chicago.
 
Also make sure that you don't have any spyware eating your bandwidth. Another thing is I have to shutdown ZoneAlarm when I play Battlefield 2 or my pings will be pretty high.
 
DSL Reports [dslreports.com] has a number of tests you can run. From the main page click on Tools on the navi bar. If you don't see it just add '/tools' to the url.

I've had high pings on and off for the two years that I've been on this ISP (local telco), but it's because I'm beyond the max distance, from the DSLAM to my house. They gave me the warning before I signed up for it, so no fault of their own. It's just one more downfall to living in the boondocks. =-(
 
Last edited:
My pings to various UT2004 servers have dropped, but I'm still having trouble along the route:
Code: 
Tracing route to server1.eastcoastfragging.com [64.34.164.142]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     9 ms    11 ms     9 ms  10.25.32.1
  2    10 ms     9 ms    10 ms  24.217.2.153
  3    10 ms    11 ms    10 ms  12.124.129.97
  4    27 ms    27 ms    28 ms  12.122.82.245
  5    27 ms    29 ms    31 ms  tbr1-p013601.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.11.109]
  6    46 ms    28 ms    28 ms  tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
  7    28 ms    29 ms    28 ms  12.122.81.245
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9    33 ms    33 ms    32 ms  OC48-POS0-0.wdc-sp2-cor-1.peer1.net [216.187.115
.234]
 10    31 ms    31 ms    31 ms  OC48-POS6-0.wdc-sbsp2-dis-1.serverbeach.com [216
.187.115.238]
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Trace complete.
 
I would send that to you isp and they can see what and where you are having problems with.
 
I never did get around to forcing an IP address change, but it looks like I might not need to. My pings have dropped by about half, which is great news. :D
 
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