Unbelievably high ping

[Reya]

Hey folks. Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas

I've been struggling for a few days now, trying to upload images to Flickr. Every single one times out, and my ping is excruciatingly high. At first, I thought it was an issue with Flickr itself, but I just ran a traceroute and it looks as though the ping leaps up as soon as it leaves me and hits IDnet:

Tracing route to flickr.com [98.139.240.139]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     5 ms     1 ms     1 ms  (router login)
  2   474 ms   519 ms   561 ms telehouse-gw2-lo1.idnet.net [212.69.63.51]
  3   666 ms   560 ms   543 ms  212.69.63.247
  4   368 ms   391 ms   417 ms  ge-1-3-0.pat1.ams.yahoo.com [195.69.145.110]
  5   536 ms   564 ms   605 ms  so-3-0-0.pat1.the.yahoo.com [66.196.65.87]
  6   777 ms   805 ms   729 ms  as-0.pat1.nyc.yahoo.com [66.196.65.13]
  7   677 ms   688 ms   736 ms  ae-0.pat1.nyc.yahoo.com [216.115.101.156]
  8   617 ms   599 ms   625 ms  ae-2.pat1.bfz.yahoo.com [216.115.100.26]
  9   598 ms   498 ms   445 ms  ae-3.msr2.bf1.yahoo.com [216.115.100.31]
10   561 ms   622 ms   639 ms  UNKNOWN-98-139-128-X.yahoo.com [98.139.128.79]
11   755 ms   728 ms   649 ms  po-13.bas1-1-prd.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.129.77]
12   524 ms   559 ms   614 ms  po-13.bas1-1-prd.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.129.77]
13   681 ms   689 ms   736 ms  www1.flickr.vip.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.240.139]

Trace complete.

It's getting incredibly frustrating. I've tried seven times tonight to upload one 6.81MB file, and it's just timing out every single time. Does anyone have any suggestions? Ideas? I'm stumped 

[zappaDPJ]

It looks like your problem is somewhere between your router and the second hop, so perhaps quite local to you. My latency to the same address is not the best (I ping 7ms locally) but I'd guess that's due to server location.

Tracing route to www1.flickr.vip.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.240.139]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2     8 ms     8 ms    12 ms  telehouse-gw2-lo1.idnet.net [212.69.63.51]
  3     8 ms     8 ms     8 ms  212.69.63.247
  4    15 ms    15 ms    15 ms  ge-1-3-0.pat1.ams.yahoo.com [195.69.145.110]
  5    30 ms    30 ms    32 ms  so-3-0-0.pat1.the.yahoo.com [66.196.65.87]
  6   111 ms   111 ms   111 ms  UNKNOWN-66-196-65-X.yahoo.com [66.196.65.226]
  7   116 ms   116 ms   116 ms  ae-2.pat1.bfz.yahoo.com [216.115.100.26]
  8   120 ms   119 ms   109 ms  ae-3.msr1.bf1.yahoo.com [216.115.100.29]
  9   115 ms   115 ms   115 ms  ae-3.msr1.bf1.yahoo.com [216.115.100.29]
10   123 ms   123 ms   154 ms  UNKNOWN-98-139-129-X.yahoo.com [98.139.129.171]

11   118 ms   117 ms   118 ms  et18-25.fab5-1-sat.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.128.101
]
12   126 ms   126 ms   126 ms  po-16.bas2-1-prd.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.129.127]

13   115 ms   124 ms   124 ms  www1.flickr.vip.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.240.139]

Trace complete.

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>

I'd definitely send a copy of your trace along with a BT speedtest to support.

[Reya]

I've checked the usual places and there don't seem to be any local faults. Plus, the BT speedtest is absolutely fine. In fact, it's faster than it's been for ages!  It's just my ping that's horrendous.

[zappaDPJ]

I think it would be worth setting up a BQM http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping if you haven't already done so. That might shed some light on what's going on.

[nowster]

Most likely is something on your link that is swamping the connection. If you can run an analyzer on the link (something like tcpdump) you might find that you're being bombarded with incoming traffic. Have a look at your "Provisional Usage" page on the IDNet Customer Portal to see whether or not there's a large amount of traffic on your link today.

[Reya]

Zappa, this is my TBBQM for late yesterday into early this morning. There was an increase in latency as I was trying the Flickr uploads, but it only happened then. No incoming ping issues, either; all my problems were outgoing ones.



Nowster, I have a small Rainmeter app on my desktop that monitors my uploads and downloads and also my ping. While I was trying to upload to Flickr, it looked like this:



All upload (and at a horrendously slow speed, too), no download, and a ping of 625ms!  And, according to my usage stats:

During the time period 1 December 2013 to 30 December 2013 your bandwidth use was:
36.49 GB Download - (Peak: 31.26 GB | Off-Peak: 5.23 GB)
8.3 GB Upload - (Peak: 7.36 GB | Off-Peak: 0.94 GB)

If your previous 7 days rate of usage continues for 31 days then the total for the month will be:
37.85 GB Download - (Peak: 32.28 GB | Off-Peak: 5.57 GB)
8.59 GB Upload - (Peak: 7.61 GB | Off-Peak: 0.97 GB)

There was no discernible difference between my usage on the 30th and the usage on every other day in December, although my issues carried on past midnight and up to around 2am this morning so I should wait until I can see the usage from today before I can confirm that.

The BT speedtest I ran last night in the middle of all this came back with decent results:



I was also having trouble with AIM voice chat (talking to my friend on the east coast of the US), although oddly I wasn't disconnected from Second Life, which is usually the first thing to boot me when my connection burps. I have absolutely no idea how to use tcpdump, but I'll download it and run it the next time I try to upload to Flickr.

It may have been just a late night thing. I uploaded a large file to Flickr this morning, and it went through just fine. Also, I finally got last night's uploads to go through using the old uploader on the site. It could have been a mixture of many things. Some things won't run any more (such as pingtest.net can't measure my ping) because all my browsers have disabled Java as 'insecure'. Plus, I updated my Avast antivirus and it now includes extra real time web monitoring features. I tried adding all the Flickr addresses I could think of to the whitelist, in case it was blocking them, but it didn't have much of an effect.

So, I still have no clue. I'm absolutely stumped. 

[zappaDPJ]

Your BQM looks normal except for a slight oddity at around 1.00am-1.30am last night. Would that be about the time the problem occurred? At nearly 1 Mbps your upload speed is fairly decent so I reckon Nowster may well be right. If it happens again I'd check to see if there's anything running in the background that might be saturating your upstream. Perhaps try uploading from another device if that's at all possible.

[Reya]

That's exactly when it occurred, Zappa. It also happened on the 28th when I tried to upload to Flickr:



And the 29th. Same thing! Each time, my average latency skyrockets and one or more of the images times out. Last night was the worst, though. Every single time I tried, it timed out or there was "a problem with the connection" and the images failed to upload.



I'll keep an eye on things and see if I continue to get the same problems.

[Glenn]

If you do a tracert to Flickr does it show any obvious hold ups?

[Steve]

I'm not surprised the latency increases when your uploading as your maxing out your connection and the router is unable to respond quickly to the ping request,however you should be able to upload successfully.

[Reya]

Glenn: a traceroute to Flickr tonight shows no problems. My first post in the thread showed where the hold-up was last night: the first hop immediately after my router. However, I checked the Zen Broadband site where issues are usually noted, and there were none for my area code at all.

Steve: I'm hoping that it was a temporary problem just over the past week or so. I know that Flickr have been upgrading (I won't say 'improving'  ) the site recently, so maybe what with that, my Avast update, plus Java being disabled in all my browsers... I dunno, maybe those things combined all just made my outbound connection to Flickr throw its hands up and fall over? 

[Reya]

Just to keep people posted, I think I've found the culprit (or at least one of them). I pay $10 a month for Spotify premium, but what I didn't know is that Spotify uses P2P streaming to provide its service, even for premium users. I noticed my upstream bandwidth maxing out again tonight, so I closed everything I had open, one program at a time, and watched my bandwidth monitor. As soon as I closed Spotify, the uploading ceased. Did a bit of googling and found some posts on the Spotify forums from people who were angry at the program hogging all their upload bandwidth.

What's worse is that there is no option to limit upstream bandwidth to, say, 20% of my connection. Spotify hogs the flippin' lot, all 100% of it.

Looks like I'll have to use the web version instead, which doesn't work as a P2P service. I know I could use NetLimiter to stop all uploads from Spotify, but I just CBA with adding yet another program. It's a clever and money-saving thing for Spotify to do, but it's one of those things where going premium should mean you at least get an option to disable or limit your uploading to the service. In reality, all my $10 a month is doing is removing the ads. 

[zappaDPJ]

I can't say I'm particularly surprised to hear that. I've 'fixed' more Laptops than I can remember simply by removing Spotify. It added literally over 5 minutes to my daughter's laptop boot time. It seems to hog all resources including CPU, memory and apparently your bandwidth. I have noticed different versions delivering different amounts of grief but in general I think it could do with a total rewrite.

[Reya]

I tried the web player, and that's download-only, so I'll be sticking with that I think. I don't have Spotify set to auto-start with the computer, but who knows what's prefetching in the background? 

They recently launched a smaller-footprint player that's an homage to WinAmp (premium users only) called SpotiAmp. It's skinnable with old WinAmp2 skins, and - having just checked it out - that's download-only, too. I can access most of Spotify's features through that, all my playlists etc, so at least I know I can run that when I don't have a browser window open.

What's piquing my interest after what you just said, Zappa, and making me wonder if I should uninstall Spotify itself and stick with the web/SpotiAmp players is the fact that - after the recent multiple 'upgrades' to the player - several other things on my computer have suffered. For instance, some of my Steam games are stuttering so badly that they're barely playable (Sims 3 and Civ 5, mainly), and some Facebook games grind to a halt every now and then for up to a minute at a time; simply freezing altogether. While both of these could be graphical issues (I recently updated my graphics driver) I think it might be an idea to uninstall the main Spotify player to see if that makes a difference.

[zappaDPJ]

The symptoms you've described are typical of what I've seen in the past on low end laptops with Spotify installed. However graphic stuttering as you quite rightly say can be caused by drivers, or all manner of things in fact, but I would still try uninstalling Spotify and see if it cures the problem.

[Reya]

I'll definitely try an uninstall to see if that helps. I intend to buy a new graphics card at Easter anyway (never buying AMD again, omg, nothing but trouble).

The disturbing thing is, this isn't a low-end laptop! It's a custom-built water-cooled gaming machine that's only a year old (I know, that means it's positively ancient). It shouldn't be struggling the way it has been 

[zappaDPJ]

To put some perspective on the matter the units I fixed/stripped of Spotify were brought into a shop for repair, such was the state of them. I'm not sure what effect it might have on a top end PC but I can imagine it might well have some impact.