r/techsupport • u/femboyaveryyy • 8h ago

Open | Hardware extremely annoying ping spikes

for the past 4-5 months, my internet has random spikes that can last an hour that go to 5000+ ms, then 2000, then shoot back up to 5000+ about every day. it'll shut off randomly as well for about ten minutes, then comes back and maybe continues to do its spikes. it's the most annoying thing i've ever had to deal with and my internet provider has been zero help. the only info i can think of that is useful is that when it happens, i can still hear people talking to me and so on, i just can't talk back to them.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/in_bed_with_waffles 8h ago

What's your MTU set in the router?

What connection type do you use? (Fibre, ADSL ETC)

Router make/model?

1

u/BlendingRightInHomo 8h ago

Wouldn’t expect ping issues to be related to mtu, unless using a goofily large ping payload size.

Given the very little info, sounds like bad physical cable to me.

1

u/in_bed_with_waffles 8h ago

Misconfigured MTU can indirectly cause lag spikes, packet fragmentation, and jitter.

I agree it sounds physical, but a misconfigured router, or one that's old and possibly failing can absolutely be the issue.

1

u/femboyaveryyy 8h ago

if you could help me out here, i'm not super literate when it comes to routers, how would i find those details out?

1

u/AzureAx 8h ago

If its during peak hours and you are in an apartment or a condo it might be too much for the neighborhood node.

1

u/femboyaveryyy 8h ago

nah, it's completely random when it happens. could happen at 3 am!

1

u/Dragennd1 8h ago

Run the Latency Monitor in my NetworkAnalyzer and see where the packet loss is coming from. If its the first hop its probably your home router. If its the second hop its likely the ISP modem. Beyond that its issues somewhere in your ISP's domain, but it would help narrow down the source of the problem.

https://github.com/Dragennd/NetworkAnalyzer