My dang Ping is high

[ryanbatc]

My ping as of late has been really high, like in the 100's. I have a 5mb Charter Communication cable connection. I usually can ping the Twin Cities (using site speedtest.net) in about 40-60 ms. I've recently been jumping around at 120-160ms. Anyone know what the problem might be? I run NOD32 and Firefox 3 with some plugins. That's the only things running in the background. Is Vista more network heavy than XP?

[Duke{CLR}]

Does the ping change throughout the day?

I had a sudden increase with my cable company way back. During peak times I had a lousy connection. The problem was that they had too many people using their lines during these time so I kicked them to the curb and went with DSL which solved my erratic ping issues.

[Apache Warrior]

Run trace route and try to find the hang up.
Apache

[ryanbatc]

Hmmm, it might be time of day. The thing is - last week, and all the time before that since we've had Charter, the connection has been fast, all the time. I just pinged a website at the U of M in downtown Minneapolis and it was only 38ms, what I used to get. Of course it's not even 8am here but that must be the issue....arggh

[JohnyRico]

If you are in a growing area then that could be the issue. When I moved into the new house the phone company guy told me my internet was going to suck for a while because when the kids got home from school and fired up WOW the whole area bogged down because the area just wasn't wired up well enough yet. About 10 days later a new grey box went in by the street and all was well.

[Duke{CLR}]

Here is what i ended up doing.

I went to this site here. Speakeasy - Speed Test

I ran the test every time I walked by my computer and logged the results on a note pad. After two days It was clear that during peak times I was slowing down. I then called tech support to complain I got a lot of BS from them but I did get them to send a guy out who rechecked all the wires in the house. Of course none of this helped. I then signed of for the free 30 day of DSL and did a side by side test for several days. My DSL has less bandwidth but it was steady all day long and very gameable. It was a pleasure kicking the cable company to the curb for the second time. The first was when I went with Dish 1.

[mapes]

If you are in a growing area then that could be the issue. When I moved into the new house the phone company guy told me my internet was going to suck for a while because when the kids got home from school and fired up WOW the whole area bogged down because the area just wasn't wired up well enough yet. About 10 days later a new grey box went in by the street and all was well.

Thats not the kids fault. It's the cable company over subscribing it's lines.

However a speed issue could be anything really. Like for instance

An upstream provider routing screwup
Malware on your machine
you ISP over subscribing they're lines
Someone scanning your IP
Worms
If you have a web server google indexing is actually quite a hit luckily you can block em by a robots.txt file

Use traceroute for routing issues. Make sure your machine is not infected. If your really paranoid put a protocol analyzer on the wire. Oh yeah if you can I'd suggest blocking inbound ICMP at your router. A ton of scanners and worms first ping your IP before trying to infect or port scan. As for cable over subscription ....good luck with that...

[JohnyRico]

Yes, it was a simple matter of that there were lots of new houses in the neighborhood and the existing lines could not support all the new customers.