Small question about ping

[snamakool123]

So hey guys, I have been wondering about this for a while, I am not complaining but just wondering. So when I play CS:GO or any Valve games, I connect to their Luxembourg server which is great because I also live in Luxembourg. The thing is that I recieve around 50ms to 60ms but the valve servers are 30km to 40km from my house (approximate). Ping.eu and whois both show that this IP is in fact in Luxembourg.

Here is a trace route I did from my pc.

Tracing route to fw0.lux.valve.net [146.66.152.2]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  fritz.box [192.168.178.1]
  2    29 ms    17 ms    17 ms  10.10.80.144
  3    18 ms    17 ms    17 ms  78.141.176.165
  4     *       28 ms    28 ms  PTLUX-Teralink-Paris.pt.lu [213.166.61.137]
  5    33 ms    33 ms    33 ms  valve.franceix.net [37.49.237.57]
  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  7    35 ms    35 ms    34 ms  fw0.lux.valve.net [146.66.152.2]

Trace complete.

I have a friend who lives in Poland and to test we used a Match Making Server Picker Utility to force a connection to Luxembourg server and both of us got exact same ping. Poland is around 1000km away from Luxembourg. So my question is why soo many km not making a difference in ping and how can some people get 20ping and be more than 400km from server while I get 50ping 40km away.

[Lurick]

Latency is added by each hop to get from point A to point B. Just because something is X distance from you but Y distance from your friend doesn't really add latency if you both have the same number of hops in between or lets say you have an ISP with equipment that takes longer to process packets compared to your friend then you can still have the same amount of latency.

[Naeaes]

Light travels so fast in the fiber that the distance is really a non-issue in these situations. The latency comes from the processing each node has to do. More nodes = more ping and also, crappy old nodes = more ping.

[mikat]

11 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Latency is added by each hop to get from point A to point B. Just because something is X distance from you but Y distance from your friend doesn't really add latency if you both have the same number of hops in between or lets say you have an ISP with equipment that takes longer to process packets compared to your friend then you can still have the same amount of latency.

yup, since they use fiber between countries (300.000 km/s is the speed of light so 1000km isn't a problem)

[snamakool123]

Quote

Latency is added by each hop to get from point A to point B. Just because something is X distance from you but Y distance from your friend doesn't really add latency if you both have the same number of hops in between or lets say you have an ISP with equipment that takes longer to process packets compared to your friend then you can still have the same amount of latency.

Quote

Light travels so fast in the fiber that the distance is really a non-issue in these situations. The latency comes from the processing each node has to do. More nodes = more ping and also, crappy old nodes = more ping.

So basically my isp had "bad" nodes and there are too many hops. You can see first hop was 17 ping and I am assuming thats my isp in same country and also my router showing around 8ms in both directions. So is it safe to say my isp has potato for servers because many people say you should have 5ms to your isp.

[Lurick]

2 minutes ago, snamakool123 said:

So basically my isp had "bad" nodes and there are too many hops. You can see first hop was 17 ping and I am assuming thats my isp in same country and also my router showing around 8ms in both directions. So is it safe to say my isp has potato for servers because many people say you should have 5ms to your isp.

Either your ISP has potato routers and switches or there is something causing delay between your modem and the ISP.

[snamakool123]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

Either your ISP has potato routers and switches or there is something causing delay between your modem and the ISP.

I mean I wouldnt see a difference between 20ms and 50ms but Ill try sending a ticket to isp. FYI my isp took 1 month to come down to my house to get internet connection 4km from main office  so only god knows if they will even look at my ticket.

[.spider.]

6 hours ago, snamakool123 said:

 You can see first hop was 17 ping and I am assuming thats my isp in same country and also my router showing around 8ms in both directions. 

Hop 2-4 is your ISP.

 

I assume that you are using DSL.

The 8ms which are shown by your modem is most likely caused by Interleaving https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction#Interleaving

 

You can ask your ISP to enable fastpath

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line#Interleaving_and_fastpath

Some ISP are doing it free of charge, others charging a bit and others aren't doing it at all.(Some ISP are only offering fastpath)

[snamakool123]

10 hours ago, .spider. said:

Hop 2-4 is your ISP.

 

I assume that you are using DSL.

The 8ms which are shown by your modem is most likely caused by Interleaving https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction#Interleaving

 

You can ask your ISP to enable fastpath

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line#Interleaving_and_fastpath

Some ISP are doing it free of charge, others charging a bit and others aren't doing it at all.(Some ISP are only offering fastpath)

Thanks for the information I will surely ask my ISP but I doubt they would do anything because they charge 3Euros/Month for a public ip address for port forwarding.

[BrightCandle]

Its also worth noting that a big part of ping inside of a game can actually be the servers processing time. Servers often use a tickrate such as 30hz (1000/30 =33ms) which can be the dominate factor in the ping times in a lot of games, well beyond basic issues like interleaving and ISP contention. When you are seeing pings like this outside of game being vastly different to inside its almost certainly server side tick rate causing the issue and in this case it could be half of the total ping and hence dwarfing all the other concerns completely.

[.spider.]

On 5/12/2016 at 9:10 AM, snamakool123 said:

Thanks for the information I will surely ask my ISP but I doubt they would do anything because they charge 3Euros/Month for a public ip address for port forwarding.

Charging for an IPv4 is not unlikely because there are only 15.9million unused addresses left.

Which makes them expensive.