So, today I found out that the higher the throughput of my Wi-Fi the higher the ping goes. It goes as high as 300 at times and 100 on average and I wonder if someone might know what causes this. When idle, all ping requests take around 10ms outside the LAN. It's also rather inconsistent because I remember times when the Wi-Fi was absolutely perfect for weeks...
Wi-Fi latency under load
- Thread starter Cross Zero
- Start date
- Jun 10, 2017
- 10,957
- 16,191
Ping to what ? It's only significant (yet not fully) if what you ping is the WiFi router itself.
Plus, globally speaking, there's absolutely nothing strange in the fact that, the higher is the load, the lower goes the ping. And like this apply to all the equipment that the ping will have to pass through to reach the host you ping...
Ping to the router, yes.
As I said, the inconsistency of it is what confuses me. One week it's ok (30 ping on speedtest) another week it's bollocks (80 ping on speedtest), but it never was this bad (100-300 Ping on speedtest)... I start to think maybe it's time to replace my PC... could be the Wi-Fi adapter too... or even the router starting to fail (would explain some other things too)...
As I said, the inconsistency of it is what confuses me. One week it's ok (30 ping on speedtest) another week it's bollocks (80 ping on speedtest), but it never was this bad (100-300 Ping on speedtest)... I start to think maybe it's time to replace my PC... could be the Wi-Fi adapter too... or even the router starting to fail (would explain some other things too)...
Last edited:
- Jun 10, 2017
- 10,957
- 16,191
You mean this
You must be registered to see the links
(or their app) ? Because it doesn't ping your router, it ping their server. And like I said, the ping will depend on the load from your computer (included) to their server (also included) ; mostly the two end points, but an overloaded router/bridge in between will have an impact.Perhaps the router starts to fail, perhaps is it time to replace your PC, but it's not and will never be a ping that will provide you this information. Especially not a 100-300ms one.
Anyway, as I implied, a ping do not do what you seem to think it do. I have a 2ms ping to reach the server used by speedtest, and a ~120ms ping to reach my LAN gateway, that I can touch with my feet. Yet, to reach the server used by speedtest, a ping need to pass through the said LAN gateway.
So, stop worrying because it need 0.1 to 0.3 seconds to reach a server that is probably at more than 100km from your computer. As long as you are below the second it's a more than acceptable value.
Also please do note to note confuse loaded and unloaded latency. Like that crabby Ookla speedtest only tests unloaded latency (also has had a history of faking speedtests for certain ISPs). There are two okay sites that I know of for actually testing ideal ISP, router, and modem bandwidth/latency stuff. Those are
Anyways, it isnt unusual to have loaded latency be higher then unloaded latency. It wont exactly be super often you'll get unloaded latencies on high network loads unless you do a lot of setup (depending on the bottleneck, high latencies can be caused by bufferbloat).
You must be registered to see the links
and
You must be registered to see the links
. There are stress/stability tests sites that also exist if you're concerned about stability dropouts (ex: every 15 - 30 minutes there is a network issue, so a test is setup for checking bandwidth/latency every minute for 60+ minutes). Lastly I'd recommend to not rely on one speedtest site as they only have so many servers, any of which could be having issues that makes your test results appear bad.Anyways, it isnt unusual to have loaded latency be higher then unloaded latency. It wont exactly be super often you'll get unloaded latencies on high network loads unless you do a lot of setup (depending on the bottleneck, high latencies can be caused by bufferbloat).