Ping....someone explain it to me!

[Thermo]

When im not working i do use my pc for online gaming (or blowing things up as mrs thermo describes it) now the speed of the game seems dependent on my ping. What exactly is it and what effects it? Sometimes i can be happily playing a game, check my ping and its about 50, then a few minutes later it can go haywire for a short time and be 750-999, and then go back down again. Does a faster connection affect it?

I am connected on a 512 connection with fasthosts. We have a wireless network, although my pc is hardwired to it. My wife has a laptop connected (very small internet useage) and my daughter has a pc connected. As with most teenagers all she seems to do with it is go on msn and beebo. When its gone haywire ive checked to amke sure no-ones downloading a big file etc

Many thanks knowledgeable ones and please explain in idiotproof terms!

 

[JohnD]

Are you on a BT line? Town centre? Village? Isolated?

 

[breezer]

as i understand it (may be wrong) you actualy share your broadband line with severl others (dont ask me how) it depends on what they are doing and how many of they there are on line.

 

[Softus]

The measurement you get from the 'ping' command is a the round-trip propogation time for a single packet. The packet doesn't use a protocol that requires a TCP connection, therefore there is no connection setup time, and the ping is a reasonably accurate indication of the delay introduced by the route that each packet takes between your computer and the one that you're 'pinging'.

You might be surprised at how many routers are involved in the path between yours and the target - it could easily be around a dozen. None of these is dedicated to handling just your network traffic - each one is subject to the effects of contention.

A standard domestic class product offers contention of up to 50:1 (50 broadband subscribers using the same equipment at the exchange), whereas a business class connection is up to 20:1. If you want a consistently faster connection then you have to pay for it.

 

[Igorian]

With TCP networking, before data is sent, it is split up into manageable chunks, called packets. PING is a program that will send a packet of information to a designated host and then wait for a reply. It then calculates how long it took for the response and displays it as a number of milliseconds.

The packet of information doesn't go directly to the host, because they are unlikely to be directly linked, but gets bounced around one or more routers until it eventually arrives at it's destination, or is lost.

The more bounces (hops) required, the longer the response time (along with other factors). You can get some idea of what the hops look like by using the 'Trace Route' program.
Open a command prompt and type tracert google.co.uk and press enter. The display is showing you the addresses of routers and servers as the packet of information is passed. It should eventually arrive or get lost. It's a good tool for identifying failed routers or those that the cleaner switched off by mistake.

 

[Thermo]

ah the muds clearing! Im in an urban environment on a bt business line by the way. So theres nothing much i can do to reduce it, and a faster connection wont improve things? It mostly happens in the evening, which i suppose is one theres a lot of other users on as well.

 

[2scoops0406]

and it stands for (p)romiscuous (in)ternet (g)roper oooo errr ! missus.

Well, OK, it stands for packet internet groper in promiscuous mode.

 

[Deluks]

In our house it means the dinner's ready

 

[2scoops0406]

In our house it means the dinner's ready

 

[eggplant]

Iggy explained pretty well, do you get the same problem on all servers? is it the same with all games (If you have Halo let me know I'll happily setup a server to test )
I suspect first off that the teenager is also downloading either mp3's from maybe a file sharing app (which will definately kill your games connection) or possibly passing photos,pics etc back and forth to her mates - which will also cause you problems. 512 isnt fast but should be ok for most games.
Another factor which is often overlooked when it comes to bad lag in games, is what is YOUR pc doing, is it up to spec for the game, do you have loads running in the backgrond etc.

 

[leecope3]

as i understand it (may be wrong) you actualy share your broadband line with severl others (dont ask me how) it depends on what they are doing and how many of they there are on line.

contention ratio...

512kbps is a bit low for gaming

try to stick to uk servers

any pc accessing the internet while your are gaming will cause ping spikes where ur ping shoots up
even opening internet explorer on another pc

 

[Karl Austin]

Just to cloud things a little, the "ping" you see in the game, isn't likely to be the same ping people are talking about here. As others have said, ping is a specific ICMP data packet (ICMP Echo), designed to measure round trip latency - However, most games don't use that to measure latency, they will send a UDP packet to the game server and measure the response time, as that gives you a more accurate idea of how your connection to the game server (and not the physical server) is behaving.

ADSL Contention ratios - These haven't been used for quite some time now, there is no 20:1, 50:1 contended product from BT Wholesale (Never really was, it was just in name). Contention ratios were replaced with the concept of priority, with office/max premium products having higher priority on the BT Wholesale network over home/max products when things start to become congested.

 

[eggplant]

Whilst the ping measured within games isnt usually done by the game shelling out to a dos ping command, the basica idea is the same - it checks the time for packets to get from A to B

ADSL Contention ratios - These haven't been used for quite some time now

since when?

 

[Igorian]

ADSL Contention ratios - These haven't been used for quite some time now, there is no 20:1, 50:1 contended product from BT Wholesale (Never really was, it was just in name). Contention ratios were replaced with the concept of priority, with office/max premium products having higher priority on the BT Wholesale network over home/max products when things start to become congested.

From the BT Website.

 

[Karl Austin]

Idea is the same, function wise it is a world apart. The game itself has to process the reply, which will be fairly low priority (As are ICMP packets usually), which means if the game server software is busy, then the response will be slower than would an ICMP packet which would be answered by the servers network stack and not by the game.

ADSL - Contention ratios haven't been mentione in BT SIN documents for about 18 months now as far as I am aware and to the general public, they were dropped around the time ADSL Max came along from memory.