High Latency

[#1]

My connection has been suffering from high latency issues over the past few days. Although speed tests reveal my ping to be as low as 15 to 20 whilst idle it shoots up as soon as I try to do anything. This has made things like online gaming impossible as whatever game I try to play I suffer from unplayable amounts of lag due to the high latency.
My download speed has not been effected and is fine, its just the latency I'm having issues with. I've had my lines tested and an engineer come out recently in the past few months when I was having download speed issues before so I don't think the problem is at my end. Any response would be appreciated.

[#2]

What kind of connection do you have and what speed up / down does it achieve?

[#3]

I've got Plusnet Unlimited and normally have a download/upload of about 6/0.3. The problem is my latency though not my speed. I can still download as per usual.

[#4]

I suggest asking for your upload to be uncapped
Also how does this https://portal.plus.net/my.html?action=data_transfer_speed compare with your IP profile from the BT speed test - further diagnostics

[#5]

Plusnet says 6.2Mbps BT says 6.26Mbps, but once again its the latency I'm having issues with.
jim:quote

[#6]

The reason I asked about the profile is that one of the symptoms of the Plusnet profile being too high, which yours isn't, can be high latency
The upload uncap can also assist as saturated upload can muck up the download latency as well

[#7]

Exactly as Oldjim says; small uplinks get clogged very quickly.  As the uplink fills up it means the time slots where your new requests (for example a latency testing ping) can be slotted into get smalle and farther between, hence leading to an increase in latency.  Your uplink is really quite tiny and it won't take much activity to negatively impact your latency.
And of course, for each bit of downloading there are the requests up which also go into your uplink.  Anything running in the background syncing content up to the cloud (dropbox, online backup, sending big emails, etc) will be a total killer on such a small uplink as yours.
Anyway, it is one possible cause.  Other possible causes are things like too many connections on a poorly spec'd router (eg torrents) which can swamp some routers, and also contention at your exchange can be an issue - which is often seen as peak-time large steps in a latency monitoring graph.  But because the issue seems to go away for you when you stop doing other stuff it sounds more like something at your end.
You can use a tool such as ThinkBroadband's Broadband Quality Ping Monitor to help you continuously monitor your connection (instead of having to run individual speed tests).  Have a look here:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping

[#8]

Also, you might find on such a small uplink that a router with configurable QOS could be very useful.  QOS can only really operate on packets to your uplink (once it has arrived on your downlink it is already too late!) and so you can set a particular machine or type of traffic to have higher priority, and others to have lower priority.  You could, for example, set web and email to be lower priority which might free it up a bit for your gaming.

[#9]

If the problem has only just started in the last few days, it could be because when your router last disconnected and reconnected, you have somehow ended up on the wrong traffic management profile. Logging in to the router, disconnecting, and then reconnecting again should fix that.

[#10]

Thanks for the replies. I had already tried reconnecting my router ejs. Is there anyway to get the cap removed without having to phone up. I hate having to go through the whole rigmarole of the phone systems. >_<

[#11]

You might find this useful if your router is the free Technicolor Plusnet one - a guide to advanced QOS on this router:
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,116556.0.html

[#12]

I've actually managed to resolve the issue myself now. Thanks for all the responses anyway.
If someone from Plusnet sees this I'd still like my upload to be uncapped.

[#13]

brill! what was it?

[#14]

Hi there,
I've placed a modify order to uncap your upload.
Out of interest for us and others, what caused the latency issue?

[#15]

I figured out that the high latency only occurred when my brother turned on his laptop, but since he normally has it on all the time I didn't make the connection straight away. After that I basically just googled 'laptop draining bandwidth' and read something about the possibility of some virus or malware causing the issue. Took his laptop and did a full scan with AVG to clean it up, low and behold my connection returned to normal afterwards. A few brief words to my brother about watching what kind of website he uses and what sort of things he downloads for good measure.
Once again thanks for the responses.