Irritating lag spikes

Technical Support
1

I play on West Coast NA, and for the last couple of days, I’ve been experiencing massive lag spikes in game every 5 to 10 minutes. My latency is usually somewhere between 43 to 52 ms, but it will jump to like 90 ms (averaged over a few seconds, I’m guessing). It doesn’t seem that bad, but I suspect that the spike is much higher than that during the time it’s actually going on.

Yesterday, I ran PingPlotter to google while I was playing, and I could see spikes of packet loss starting at hop 2 and hop 3 (still in the Comcast network), so I didn’t think anything was wrong with the OW servers. I called Comcast, and they said they were doing maintenance so, the problem would stop by late last night. I asked them about my modem, and they said there were no errors on it, so it was their problem. Anyway, the problem (or a similar one) is still there this morning, though I am not seeing the same packet loss on early hops I saw last night. It happened once in half an hour, but it could have been a fluke.

What am seeing from the graph of a trace to 24.105.30.129 significant variance in the ping to hop 12, 137.221.65.6 xe-0-0-1-1-br02-eqla1.as57976. net (located in France and owned by Blizzard, according to Google). It’s mostly around 42 ms to 50 ms, but I’ve seen it shoot up to as high 576 ms averaged over 5 seconds, and there were two significant sections of 100% packet loss at that hop over the half hour, or so, I was monitoring it. I’m not really sure if this is a problem because the packet loss doesn’t follow through to the end, but it seems weird the ping fluctuates so much there and that there were those two instances of 100% packet loss. I’m not sure how that would have looked in game, because I can’t ping 24.105.30.129 and play at the same time, it seems.

Anyway, just letting you know what I saw. Maybe it’s a problem, maybe not. But I know that I’m still getting lag spikes that cause me to lose control of my character for several seconds at a time. Quite irritating.

Anyway, here is the trace route for one of the instances of packet loss, just so you can see it:

Target Name: 24.105.30.129
IP: 24.105.30.129
Date/Time: 8/29/2020 11:36:17 AM - 8/29/2020 11:36:22 AM

Hop Sent PL% Min Max Avg Host Name / [IP]
1 6 0 0.67 0.72 0.70 192.168.4.1 [192.168.4.1]
2 6 0 8.04 22.53 11.06 96.120.96.245 [96.120.96.245]
3 6 0 7.72 9.63 8.78 po-304-1240-rur102.sandy.ut.utah.comcast. net [96.110.233.233]
4 6 0 8.49 20.63 11.15 162.151.49.105 [162.151.49.105]
5 6 0 24.15 28.41 26.05 be-33660-cr02.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast. net [68.86.90.145]
6 6 0 24.33 26.19 25.04 96.110.41.229 [96.110.41.229]
7 6 0 24.06 24.71 24.48 be-1212-cr12.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast. net [96.110.46.18]
8 6 0 24.77 36.28 27.83 be-301-cr01.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast. net [96.110.37.170]
9 6 0 24.29 25.58 24.86 be-12544-pe01.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast. net [68.86.87.150]
10 6 0 24.42 34.96 26.56 66.208.216.238 [66.208.216.238]
11 6 0 31.52 32.49 32.01 ae1-br02-eqsv5.as57976. net [137.221.70.35]
12 6 100 0 0 0 xe-0-0-1-1-br02-eqla1.as57976. net [137.221.65.6]
13 6 0 31.36 32.07 31.51 137.221.68.93 [137.221.68.93]
14 6 0 32.11 33.63 32.83 24.105.30.129 [24.105.30.129]

Thanks!

Edit: sorry about the trace route formatting. Not sure how to fix it…

2

OP: numberrrrs

Me, a console player with no idea how computers work: Wud?

3

Many times, the WHOIS info will not be up-to-date for many years, but this hop is not in France.

As for the data loss on the Blizzard addresses, they occasionally mitigate ping requests as a DDoS protection mechanism. This results in reported losses/high pings, but they are false flags.

Instead of using traceroute, use WinMTR, as recommended in the pinned threads. Focus on whether all packets you’re sending are making it to the Blizzard servers, and what the ping looks like on the final few hops.

If you’re still getting the 90ms on early hops, then that would still be something Comcast is responsible for addressing.

4

All the high ping fluctuation is at hop 12 so it probably happens between hop 11 and hop 12, regardless of their locations. The early hops are all normal in terms of ping. If we are just talking about PL, then the DDoS protection explanation makes sense to me.

I didn’t use Traceroute; I used PingPlotter.

I gave you one traceroute at one point in time that I chose and copied as text from a graph of all the pings/PLs from every hop over a half an hour. Looking at WinMTR, it looks like it has no functionality to monitor and plot network activity as a function of time. I’ve never used WinMTR, so maybe it does have that functionality now, though it appears to have been last updated in 2015. However, if (as I suspect) it does not have that functionality, since this issue is intermittent, I would say that PingPlotter is the superior tool in this particular case.

All that being said, this behavior has been Comcast’s fault before. I talked to them about it yesterday. The difference is that this morning, all their hops looked normal. This is the first time I’ve set 24.105.30.129 as the target. I usually set Google as the target so I can play and correlate the effect of Comcast’s crap to what I see in game. I set 24.105.30.129 as the target this time because I wasn’t seeing problems on Comcast’s end, but I ended up seeing something that looked weird to me on Blizzard’s end. However, if highly fluctuating pings (like up to 0.5 or even 2 seconds) and high intermittent PL between the servers at hops 11 and 12 is normal, I guess it is what it is.