What exactly affects ping?

Robin

Robin

New member
I tried Googling this, but it wasn't much help and a lot of terms were thrown around that I don't quite understand.

We just got an uncapped line installed and I decided to try playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online. My ping is usually 200-300, but it can increase if someone is downloading etc. But lately its been around 800 even when no one is downloading. We have added more devices (phones, tablets) to our home network, so could that be the cause of the larger ping?

Also, does the visual settings (high texture details, resolution) affect the ping during an online game?

Unreal Tournament 2004 is also installed at my school and the lab has around 30 computers connected. The ping there is about 30-50 and I'm pretty sure my PC has better specs and our internet is faster than at school. Location also isn't the issue since I live fairly close to my school. What could the cause of this major ping difference be?

I'm such a noob:confused:....
 
Robin said:
I tried Googling this, but it wasn't much help and a lot of terms were thrown around that I don't quite understand.

We just got an uncapped line installed and I decided to try playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online. My ping is usually 200-300, but it can increase if someone is downloading etc. But lately its been around 800 even when no one is downloading. We have added more devices (phones, tablets) to our home network, so could that be the cause of the larger ping?

Also, does the visual settings (high texture details, resolution) affect the ping during an online game?

Unreal Tournament 2004 is also installed at my school and the lab has around 30 computers connected. The ping there is about 30-50 and I'm pretty sure my PC has better specs and our internet is faster than at school. Location also isn't the issue since I live fairly close to my school. What could the cause of this major ping difference be?

I'm such a noob:confused:....
Click to expand...

Are you playing on international servers? This usually results in a higher ping, than if you were playing on a local server.

Also, you say other devices are connected to the line. In my knowledge, if those devices are making use of the same line, it can increase your ping as they are using the same bandwidth you are - thus causing speeds to drop, albeit maybe only slightly - depending on what those devices are being used for (be it normal browsing or streaming). Streaming takes a lot of bandwidth and can/will cause an increase in the ping count.

These school computers, are they connected locally to one another? It'd explain why it's lower than online play.
 
Robin said:
I tried Googling this, but it wasn't much help and a lot of terms were thrown around that I don't quite understand.

We just got an uncapped line installed and I decided to try playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online. My ping is usually 200-300, but it can increase if someone is downloading etc. But lately its been around 800 even when no one is downloading. We have added more devices (phones, tablets) to our home network, so could that be the cause of the larger ping?

Also, does the visual settings (high texture details, resolution) affect the ping during an online game?

Unreal Tournament 2004 is also installed at my school and the lab has around 30 computers connected. The ping there is about 30-50 and I'm pretty sure my PC has better specs and our internet is faster than at school. Location also isn't the issue since I live fairly close to my school. What could the cause of this major ping difference be?

I'm such a noob:confused:....
Click to expand...

Graphics is rendered locally not via a network - graphics does not affect ping

Basically ping is the time it takes for data to travel from point A to point B. So if you connect to a server in SA your ping will be Sub 100ms 1/10 of a second but if you connect to a server in the EU it will be anywhere from 250ms to 350ms meaning the data has to travel further so the response time is longer.

Who is your ISP? The reason for the high ping could be... Shaping, congestion of an exchange or server could be very far away (out of the EU/SA).
 
Hagan said:
Are you playing on international servers? This usually results in a higher ping, than if you were playing on a local server.

These school computers, are they connected locally to one another? It'd explain why it's lower than online play.
Click to expand...
I think they are international but I'm not sure. How do you check if they're local?

We can LAN play Unreal Tournament so I think they are connected locally.

Glordit said:
Graphics is rendered locally not via a network - graphics does not affect ping

Basically ping is the time it takes for data to travel from point A to point B. So if you connect to a server in SA your ping will be Sub 100ms 1/10 of a second but if you connect to a server in the EU it will be anywhere from 250ms to 350ms meaning the data has to travel further so the response time is longer.

Who is your ISP? The reason for the high ping could be... Shaping, congestion of an exchange or server could be very far away (out of the EU/SA).
Click to expand...
So running the game on high settings does not affect online play at all?

I think our ISP is Telkom and we have a 2Mbps line. I have noticed our internet is slower at night, is that them throttling/shaping us?
 
>So running the game on high settings does not affect online play at all?

Latency should be largely unaffected (couple technicalities aside), but the game play will be affected by game settings. Primarily via smoothness of the experience. i.e. Its easier to frag on a smoothly running game (at low settings) than other way round.

In other cases it affects things more directly. e.g. With CoD4 if you tweak the *graphics* settings right you can actually jump higher in game (no joke).
 
Ping (or rather latency) is a funny little thing, and I doubt very many people actually understand what it indicates.

Firstly, in my opinion, the best way to measure ping would be to use the built-in ping utility that comes standard with windows or linux. Just run it from the command prompt. I’ll state why I prefer that over looking at in-game values later.

The simplified understanding of your latency is the time it takes to send a packet to a remote device, and get a response back from it, effectively making it the round-trip time (RTT) for a packet to return to its sender. So to correct the earlier statement that “ping” is the time it takes for data to go from point A to point B is not correct, it’s from point A to B back to A again. Ping is a special command/packet built on the ICMP.

A typical ping packet would be small, and would normally fit wholly into one transmitted datagram that is sent to the remote device. If the packet didn’t fit, it would have to be fragmented and reassembled at the remote device, which then sends a reply that is segmented and reassembled at your PC. This would obviously affect the value of the latency in a negative way.

Can graphics affect latency? Yes, it can (say what?). Let’s say you have a crappy PC that’s running at its peak capability trying to render and process everything you require. The framerate is dropping, and it’s becoming overwhelmed. Your network thread has a backlog of received network packets received from the server or other client, but since the CPU is too busy with the rest of the workload, it hasn’t had time to process those packets. By the time it does, it only then determines the latency by looking at the time the request was sent and the current time of processing. Though the packet was received long ago, it is only now thinking it received it. There actually are no latency problems; just the PC is becoming overwhelmed. This is one of the reasons why “pros” play on minimum settings at all times. This is why the good old Ping command is better, as all it does is ping.

I have actually experienced this on an embedded device running software on Windows Embedded Standard 7. The graphics refresh requirements were killing the app, causing it to drop network connections due to timeouts, caused by it not giving enough CPU time to the network thread.

Does bandwidth affect latency? Theoretically, absolutely not. Think of having a 0.5” pipe feeding water from your geyser to your tap. Increasing the diameter of the pipe won’t make the warm water come sooner, would it? Nope, but you would get a hell of a lot more water by the time it comes out. But! If your line was congested and couldn’t get the packets out fast enough, then a faster line would decrease latency up to the point where it has enough bandwidth to get all packets out without a backlog. After that, increasing the bandwidth won’t affect your latency.

For instance, I used to play WoW in the early days on a dial-up modem. When we had our big PVP bashes in Southshore, the number of players in the immediate area would cause my poor 56Kbps modem to get a heart attack, since the number of packets being sent to my PC to update all the players’ positions and actions was overwhelming. The latency would go from 600ms to 20,000ms before disconnecting. Upgrading to a 387Kbps ADSL line later fixed that issue.

Another thing that could affect latency is packet drop rates, as packets have to be retransmitted until successfully acknowledged. Packets are typically lost if some server along the way is congested. It would drop packets that it can’t store in its buffer.

Also what comes to mind is the windowing algorithm that is used by the TCP/IP stack on the device you are using, assuming the game you are playing is using its own packets to determine latency. Nowadays, though, next generation networks have far better ways of adjusting the TCP window size. I remember that a while ago there was something in Windows’ TCP algorithm where it would wait for a certain amount of packets to be in its out-going buffer before transmitting the bulk of packets. This actually created a very noticeable amount of latency in, for instance, WoW. You had to go modify a registry setting to disable it.

Typical latency values are:
<10ms for LANs
10-50ms for SA servers over ADSL
180ms+ for international servers (EU and US).

I hope that helps.
 
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Awesome first post Yster....

Yeah, 800ms seems a bit high.... but then again it really depends on so many factors. Do a traceroute to the server that you play on, it may give you some kind of indication of where the ping jumps up to this high level.
 
Yster said:
Typical latency values are:
<10ms for LANs
10-50ms for SA servers over ADSL
180ms+ for international servers (EU and US).

I hope that helps.
Click to expand...

If you're ever on a LAN that has anything over 1ms, please be sure to let me know as I would love to see a data centre as large as a province :P
 
to0kenZA said:
If you're ever on a LAN that has anything over 1ms, please be sure to let me know as I would love to see a data centre as large as a province :P
Click to expand...

I would agree with you, but I have worked on systems that run on LANs inside train cabins, where certain devices could take up to 200ms to respond depending on several factors, as explained above. Typically the problem isn't the network, but the devices. I also initially made the assumption that surely nothing could take longer than 10ms to respond, but I still had frequent time-outs. Turns out sometimes remote devices are too busy to respond to my pings. Even a 1.5GHz embedded device with 2GB of RAM could be so busy processing data that WES7 can't respond to the ping request in-time.

Further to your question, I pinged some IPs in my company's LAN. Average ping was 1-3ms, where the worst was 5ms (shown below). We have a serious network ;)

Code: 
Pinging x with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=128
Reply from x: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for x:
    Packets: Sent = 25, Received = 25, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 26ms, Average = 5ms
 
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