Over the last 24 hours, my ping has been crazy.  I have DSL and I average a ping of 50 on about thirty servers I typically play on.  Over the weekend,  my ping started to jump between 50 and 500 in a matter of seconds!!!!  It's like I'm using a 28.8k dial-up.

I don't think it's my connection because the internet seems to work fine.  I haven't adjusted any game settings.  I'm totally confused as to why this has suddenly started to happen.  Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?  Thanks.

Routing  

Run periodic tracerts to whichever servers you typically play on.  Open the command prompt and type "tracert xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" with the x's being the ip address.  Normally it should look something like this:

8    12 ms    12 ms    11 ms  68.48.0.162
9    11 ms    12 ms    13 ms  12.126.174.73
10    12 ms    11 ms    13 ms  gbr6-p30.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.9.70]
11    13 ms    14 ms    12 ms  ar9-p3110.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.189]

My guess is you're going to see MUCH higher ping times (200-300 ms rather then 20-60 or so) on each hop when you're lagging as compared to when you're not.  If the first few hops ping's vary widely (#1-3 or so) you should call your ISP and complain.  More likely, you'll see the higher numbered hops skipping around, and there isn't a whole lot you can do about that short of changing to an ISP that's on a different backbone.  Since latency is not (for the most part) dependent on bandwidth, it shouldn't affect your normal web activities very much.

I have had that happen a lot with my cable connection.  Tracert shows nothing.

Also have to take into consideration at weekends when people are not in school and adults are at home on the net evening and weekends are gonna be slow internet and laggy as you are connectin to yer ISP server for net so in turn pings will be crap...


i have had this and phoned my ISP and due to a high demand for ADSL and borad band i have to put up with a #### connection at weekends and evening which is not helpfull when i have a mohaa clan match on or i want to chill and play SOFII    

in the end i complained so much bout the service i eventually got my ISP to make a deal with me having a Business connection for a home line which took some work  

Blade is correct just high internet access and usage is sometimes the reason.

Also take into account that browsing the web and playing an online game are not something you can compare to study your Connection performance.

The problem that you have been having is very likely a problem at one of the MANY routers that your connection goes through on the web to send packets from your PC to the Game Server.  If one of those routers is having a bad day and holding onto your packets longer then your performance will go straight to ####.

It doesnt matter if you have Dial UP, DSL, Cable, ISDN... all of these high speed options have to send information from your pc to the server in question.  If they hit a roadblock somewhere in the middle... you still screwed, no matter how fast your connection is.

Well, I must have been lucky throughout college while on the LAN.  Those 4 years, I never had a problem.

I just think there is something up with my horrible cable modem (oh, DSL would be so nice, but no.... not availible).  Its not due to peak hours, as it can happen at 9am on a Saturday (don't ask why I was up).  Its not based on CPU processing.  I just think its my ISP.