Ping Spikes Inquiry

[GenMatrix]

Hey All,

Loving the R2 and set it up yesterday! On the connection test I am seeing spikes on the ping sections. Is this normal or should I look into seeing what the culprit is? I imagine the only thing I can actually change is the modem but before I go that route I wanted to make sure this wasn't normal behavior.

[Netduma Fraser]

Hey, welcome to the forum!

What I would suggest is scheduling some more tests over the period of a day and see if it varies at all. If it varies quite a lot and you can see going back through the history that it seems to be worse during peak times then that will be down to the ISP.

[GenMatrix]

7 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Hey, welcome to the forum!

What I would suggest is scheduling some more tests over the period of a day and see if it varies at all. If it varies quite a lot and you can see going back through the history that it seems to be worse during peak times then that will be down to the ISP.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check my network as well to make sure I don't have any ethernet cables looping into themselves and not actually connected to the devices. On another note, I am seeing spikes of 40-60mbps on the network monitor every 5 seconds but it's not attributing to any device on the top graph (with the names of devices), it's pretty consistent and I wonder if that's factoring in

[Bert]

You have to be more specific, ie what sort of connection etc.

 

I am in europe now where I have 500/40 cable and I cannot get the jitter ironed out no matter what I do, it's purely down to the modem and ISP. Like I have 10ms ping to Google but with constant jitter up to 30-40ms. Even on idle line.

 

I suspect it's down to the Puma chipset in my modem though.

[GenMatrix]

1 minute ago, Bert said:

You have to be more specific, ie what sort of connection etc.

 

I am in europe now where I have 500/40 cable and I cannot get the jitter ironed out no matter what I do, it's purely down to the modem and ISP. Like I have 10ms ping to Google but with constant jitter up to 30-40ms. Even on idle line.

 

I suspect it's down to the Puma chipset in my modem though.

This is a cable connection. Currently, it configured as such:

Cable Modem > R2

R2 > Netgear 10 Port Switch > Netgear Orbi (as an AP only)

[Bert]

There is a good chance it's in your modem or neighborhood cable node.

 

Like when I turn off QoS I get huge spikes with saturated line, 400ms+ on upload and 100ms on download.

 

When I run 95/95 on the sliders the bufferbloat is gone but I am left with these spikes up to 30-40ms and I can't iron these out. I had a older Cisco modem the last time I was here and it had way less jitter.

 

In your case if your modem is a Puma 6 chipset you might have the same issue.

[Netduma Fraser]

15 minutes ago, GenMatrix said:

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check my network as well to make sure I don't have any ethernet cables looping into themselves and not actually connected to the devices. On another note, I am seeing spikes of 40-60mbps on the network monitor every 5 seconds but it's not attributing to any device on the top graph (with the names of devices), it's pretty consistent and I wonder if that's factoring in

Could you provide a screenshot of when you see that happen please?

[GenMatrix]

31 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Could you provide a screenshot of when you see that happen please?

When I unplugged all devices to do the connection test (to see if any devices were causing the ping spikes) it seemingly stopped for now. The more I think about it, the more I remember seeing this same behavior when I had a router I installed DD-WRT on (via their GUI). I'm sure it'll crop it's head back up and will take a video to show.

[GenMatrix]

1 hour ago, Bert said:

There is a good chance it's in your modem or neighborhood cable node.

 

Like when I turn off QoS I get huge spikes with saturated line, 400ms+ on upload and 100ms on download.

 

When I run 95/95 on the sliders the bufferbloat is gone but I am left with these spikes up to 30-40ms and I can't iron these out. I had a older Cisco modem the last time I was here and it had way less jitter.

 

In your case if your modem is a Puma 6 chipset you might have the same issue.

I have the Arris TM1602 which apparently does have the Puma 6 chipset, thank you for this information @Bert.

[Netduma Fraser]

47 minutes ago, GenMatrix said:

When I unplugged all devices to do the connection test (to see if any devices were causing the ping spikes) it seemingly stopped for now. The more I think about it, the more I remember seeing this same behavior when I had a router I installed DD-WRT on (via their GUI). I'm sure it'll crop it's head back up and will take a video to show.

So it seems as though there is one device that is the cause, maybe add them slowly back and see if you can narrow down which one it is.

[Mobel]

2 hours ago, Bert said:

There is a good chance it's in your modem or neighborhood cable node.

 

Like when I turn off QoS I get huge spikes with saturated line, 400ms+ on upload and 100ms on download.

 

When I run 95/95 on the sliders the bufferbloat is gone but I am left with these spikes up to 30-40ms and I can't iron these out. I had a older Cisco modem the last time I was here and it had way less jitter.

 

In your case if your modem is a Puma 6 chipset you might have the same issue.

@Bert As I can remember we have the same ISP (Ziggo) 500/40 dl/ul try putting the sliders both on 10% with BB set to always and share excess both enabled and do a connection benchmark.

I found the sweetspot is between 7-15% for upload and for download between 5-20% on BB sliders with Ziggo 500/40 and Compal Connectbox in bridge mode.

Under load both my ping stays average 11ms and a few spikes to 15ms.

[Mobel]

Let me know if that works for you.

My jitter is almost always 0 sometimes around 1-3ms.

Try to connect the cables without the cap on the splitter because that can cause jitter as well. See pic 

[Mobel]

[Bert]

3 minutes ago, Mobel said:

@Bert As I can remember we have the same ISP (Ziggo) 500/40 dl/ul try putting the sliders both on 10% with BB set to always and share excess both enabled and do a connection benchmark.

I found the sweetspot is between 7-15% for upload and for download between 5-20% on BB sliders with Ziggo 500/40 and Compal Connectbox in bridge mode.

Under load both my ping stays average 11ms and a few spikes to 15ms.

 

I tried that already as test. But there is still that random background jitter that is always there. It's even there with no load on your connection at all.

 

Also it's not a acceptable solution to have to throttle your connection to 10% to get a somewhat stable ping.

 

I had one of their Cisco modems before, it gave like 3ms jitter. These Compal Connectboxes are just shite and they should get rid of them.

[Mobel]

Yes i know the Compal/Arris Puma6 modems are really bad for latency sensitive stuff.

I am waiting till end this year or Jan/Feb 2021 then I have Fiber here going to change directly to that for a more stable line.

[GenMatrix]

On 8/8/2020 at 12:43 PM, Netduma Fraser said:

So it seems as though there is one device that is the cause, maybe add them slowly back and see if you can narrow down which one it is.

It was the modem, installed a new one (with a broadcom chipset vs awful puma) and boom, everything on ping test looks much more stable. I'll continue to keep an eye on it. I haven't seen the weird behavior on the Network monitor app yet, but I'll open a new thread if I do. Thanks @Bert and @Netduma Fraser

Super Happy with the R2 and looking forward to all the great things to come!

[Netduma Fraser]

Thanks fantastic to hear, thanks for the update! I'll close this topic now as it's been resolved.