Weird ping interaction

[Mage]

For some reason my ping will sit on 92-93ms when I connect which is unreasonably high when the server is on low player count, but if I start a download and then it stops, my ping drops to 31-32ms which seems reasonable, but after a couple of minutes it will shoot back up to 92-93ms again and you can repeat the same interaction over and over. Was curious if anybody knows any reasoning behind this as I am absolutely clueless.

Included a video to demonstrate

vlc-record-2022-09-21-10h39m10s-Desktop 2022.09.21 - 10.38.10.03.DVR.mp4-

Watch "vlc-record-2022-09-21-10h39m10s-Desktop 2022.09.21 - 10.38.10.03.DVR.mp4-" on Streamable.

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[walnash]

Im also getting this

 

[Smeris]

The in and out values you see in the net graph are the amount of network packages you're sending in and out, each second. It's quite a lot! And then imagine you're only sending about 11 kilobits a second.

Your router does more than just send wifi signals, and is fully responsible for assigning who gets what packet at a specific moment. You can even tell it to prioritize you over other people in your network. I think that two things can happening here, but im not fully sure:

One thing that might be happening is that your router is queing the download packets and your server connection packets. Therefor delivering a load of Download packets, and a load of source engine packets. Even osccilating between two packets can be enough for the dumb source engine to think, ooh, that came back quick! reducing your ping by 50%

Another thing could be that your router is thinking you deserve all the bandwidth, and starts prioritising you. I think this is not very likely however since you should suffer from a 12ms ping (in TCP) just alone, based roughly on the speed of light. leaving 18ms for all network equipment and perpheads ryzenburger server to handle your network. A 20 tickrate server accounts for 50ms of latency too.

would be cool to check if you set steam's bandwidth limitation to, maybe 25% of what you get in a speedtest.net run and check if it still occours. If you're on wifi, this effect can even be more severe too.

 

[Mage]

Seems to be a server issue since it affects many people regardless of location, ping is just floored to an arbitrary number even if your ping were to be lower than that, unless net_graph ms is wrong.

at cl_updaterate 16 it will floor at 92-93ms
while at cl_updaterate 66 it is 116-117ms


maybe it has something to do with cloudflare idk!

 

[TYMON007]

I dont know where you live, for me in Poland regular-low ping is 92-117 on net graph, when the server is full-almost full i get like 170 with spikes to 200. Its probably not even yours network fault, but the server response time is delayed due to load. Pretty normal with 128 people playing an old, crappy optimized game, from 2006. As a comparison in csgo(i know that there are servers located in poland) in matchmaking i can get around 1-5 ping which is impressive.

 

[Agent]

Could try a third party ping killer app like wtfast not sure if it's allowed but could possibly help sort your ping out?

 

[TYMON007]

As far as I know VPNs of any sort are not prohibited, although I would ask an admin prior to using such software. I am sure you can even ask in game via f6 report

 

[TYMON007]

To be honest though, I dont think a VPN would help you much as there are two common misunderstandings about them. The first one is "do they actually help" - well, it depends, depends on everything and usually not on the things you are able to influence. Perp has a ping of 92-200 ping and its kind of usual, nothing weird about it. The ping is also connected to the server itself, as on high loads, its harder for him to respond on time.
The second thing is "Why you say it doesnt work, if it clearly lowered my ping" - thats because the server shows ping to the VPN server closest to it, so the ping might be even bigger in fact, but there is no way for you to check it.

 

[Agent]

Also it might be as simple as coming from WiFi to ethernet cable, I remember I had horrible pings when I was on wifi but soon as I changed towired connection it's smooth as anything