Spiking ping

[asmorrey1]

Hi. I was having a problem while playing whereby people would kind of skip and jump and planes would judder through the sky. I check my ping and for some reason it rises to like 300 400 and then drops down to it's normal 50. Is there anything i can do to remedy or do i just have to put up with it? I have ample specs to run it ( i think):

3GHZ processor,
2G or RAM
geforce 8600GT
i have vista 32 bit and have run it as administrator etc.

anyway any help would be greatly appreciated thanks!

[Natt]

Re: Spiking ping

It's your connection or ISP.
Are you using wireless?
Are you sharing your connection with anyone else?
Have you checked for spyware & viruses?
Who is your ISP?

[asmorrey1]

Re: Spiking ping

ISP: SKY broadband (8MB)

I am connected wirelessly using a netgear usb network adaptor. this is the only computer im using it on. but problems with sky in general means that rounter must live downstairs so this is the only feasible way of connecting... i will check for spyware but my comp is fairly new (christmas)

[Natt]

Re: Spiking ping

Is your connection secure? Your neighbor might be leeching your broadband!

[asmorrey1]

Re: Spiking ping

yeh im pretty sure it came with a WEP TKIP password that you have to enter when setting up the network

[[Expletive Deleted]]

WEP is not secure. Since it never changes, you can sniff out part of it from each packet and put together the whole thing in very little time. With the right tools (easily googled and downloaded) someone can get into a WEP "secured" network in under 30 minutes.
Use WPA if your router and wifi card support it.

You might want to manually update Punkbuster, too. Sometimes when it calls home I get lag spikes. And I am 100% sure they have nothing to do with performance constraints with my computer...

[asmorrey1]

Re: Spiking ping

damn, so how the heck do i make it secure? and how do i set up punkbuster manually isn't it like pb_setup 0 or something?

[originalkk]

Re: Spiking ping

Assuming your broadband connection isn't the issue, what anti-virus are you running?

There is a bug in the latest release of Avast Home 4.8 that has hit me with a massively spiking ping. There is a beta release of the next update which fixes this over on the Avast forums which I have installed and the pings are back to normal. Note the issue was first found by WOW players experiencing delays in keystrokes being registered. This explains why my pings were fine when flying a plane with a joystick, but spiked whenever I was on the ground.

[asmorrey1]

Re: Spiking ping

well i have now moved my comupter downstairs to be connected directly to the router via ethernet. I did have norton but removed it as interfered with my wireless router. I don't have any antivirus software at the moment, could you reccommend avast? I also set the affinity for bf2.exe to one (as im running a dual core processor) which seemed to remedy the situation to some degree, although i have to change it every single time! is there a way to save this setting? thanks again for all the helpful replies

[originalkk]

Re: Spiking ping

Avast Home has been fine for me for the past few years and it is free!

The only other thing I can think apart from your internet connection is if you have Zonealarm running it can cause lots of lag, though I can't remember if it actually shows as ping spikes.

Test your actual connection by pinging a game server's IP from Windows(sorry if you know this already)!

Click Start, Run, enter "cmd" in the Open box, click OK, then on the command line in the cmd box type:

ping {server IP address} -n 50

and press enter. Replace {server IP address} with the actual IP address of the server. You should get 50 pings sent to the server and you can check the response times and packet loss. You can change the "50" to a higher value to get a longer timespan to check. If this comes back OK then it suggests the problem is not with your connection, but something in the game (could be a punkbuster issue) or on your PC.

[Natt]

Re: Spiking ping

If you have an AMD processor, there is the dual core optimizer which should fix the issue.

[asmorrey1]

Re: Spiking ping

thanks originalkk i didnt know that actually ill give it a go! i mean i can't understand how my connection could have a problem i think it will be down to something really glitchy with punkbuster or something. Sadly i don't have an AMD processor would be nice if i did and that was the fix! i have pentium

im also reinstalling the game completely to see if that makes any difference

[originalkk]

Re: Spiking ping

If you don't have any anti-virus at the moment, you could have picked up a trojan (eg a keylogger) which is using your connection and screwing up your pings. I would suggest you install some anti-virus software and run a full system scan to check for this. I'd normally recommend Avast, but as it has it's own ping problem at the moment you might be better to wait until the next update before installing that. The other well known free anti-virus is AVG, which is OK, but there are a number of others. I've only used Avast and AVG.

Also maybe install and run some anti-spyware software (eg Spybot, AdAware etc). It only takes a few seconds to pick up malware, though if you're behind a NAT router you should be OK unless you've clicked on something dodgy.

After all that, you could try shutting down non-essential processes (from Task Manager) before starting the game to see if anything else that is running on your PC could be causing a conflict, but you'll need to know what the essential system processes are (Google should tell you).

And a re-install does sometimes fix many strange things in BF2!

[asmorrey1]

Re: Spiking ping

on reinstalling everything seems to have smoothed out playing wise however the ping is still an issue i will sort out my antivirus software and do a scan now! I have also shut off the videos at the beginning of the game and am going to rename the .exe file see what happens. Was playing just then and got the blue screen of death and my comp crashed, not too worried but ill see how it goes