Sudden Ping Jumps

[Stojan031]

While playing multiplayer games such as CS:GO I get sudden ping jumps up to 300ms I didn't seem to have these problems on Windows and I am sure it's not my internet connection and I have set max acceptable ping to 150ms any help ?

Loving the system so far !

[deepakdeshp]

Hello
First Linux isn't windows.
Some programs are written for Windows and may not work exactly in Mint

[Stojan031]

Hello
First Linux isn't windows.
Some programs are written for Windows and may not work exactly in Mint

Yeah I understand that just wondering why is my ping jumping
CS:GO is Linux supported .

[RockinOp]

Hey Stojan,

A high ping rate is an indicator of poor network responsiveness (a.k.a. network latency). There are many things that can cause network latency issues. Identifying periodic latency issues can be tedious to find, but it can be done.

I am going to make a few assumptions here:

• You haven't changed/adjusted any of your physical connections between your gaming computer and the Internet. Sometimes a bad cable or a loose cable connection can cause issues. This includes the part that the ISP is responsible for. I have had two separate ISPs fail me. One just had a loose coax cable connector and the other had a port go bad on their switch.
• You are using a wired connection from your gaming computer to the Internet. Wireless seems to get a bit flaky every now and then, giving me high pings.
• There are no other devices on your network that could be periodically sucking up bandwidth. My wife's phone had some kind of malware on it (maybe it was just the Facebook or Pandora app) that would periodically access the Internet causing a surprising amount of latency for me while gaming.
• You are using Steam with Mint 17.x. Not saying you can't or shouldn't used Mint 18. Steam seemed to have issues with Mint 18.1 XFCE when I installed it (last week sometime). I am assuming it has the same issues in the Cinnamon & MATE display environments as well (I did not verify). In the end, these may have just been issues for my setup only.

Since this issue occurs with all of your online games, then you would have to look at the remaining software on the gaming computer itself - which is where its sounds like you are expecting to find an issue. It sounds like something on your computer is periodically accessing the Internet for some reason (maliciously or not). You are going to need to use something like nethogs to figure out what is transmitting/receiving data. nethogs is a utility that shows what processes are using bandwidth on a specific network interface (e.g., your wired network connection).

Install nethogs by opening the terminal and typing the following:

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sudo apt-get install nethogs

nethogs needs the name of the network interface you would like to monitor. Use ifconfig to determine that. ifconfig can be used to list all of the network interfaces with their key characteristics (e.g., IP addresses).

Type the following command to identify your network interface names:

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ifconfig

Your output should be something like:

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eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 74:d0:2b:93:18:5c  
          inet addr:192.168.0.121  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::76d0:2bff:fe93:185c/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:4150 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2082 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:5095573 (5.0 MB)  TX bytes:251802 (251.8 KB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:172 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:172 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:13874 (13.8 KB)  TX bytes:13874 (13.8 KB)

There should be two or three (possibly more) interfaces. Their names will be something like eth0, wlan0, enp2s0, wlp2s0b1, or lo. lo is your loopback address (irrelevant here). eth0 is your wired connection and wlan0 is your wireless connection. enp2s0 & wlp2s0b1 are the new way to name the wired (name starts with 'en') and wireless (name starts with 'wl') interfaces. It appears that Mint 17 uses the old way and 18.1 uses the new way for naming the interfaces.

Without any other applications running, start nethogs by typing the following (substitute your interface name where 'eth0' is):

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sudo nethogs eth0

You should see something like the following (my Firefox is running so I can type this post):

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PID   USER     PROGRAM                     DEV        SENT         RECEIVED       
3161  rockinop /usr/lib/firefox/firefox    eth0       11.170       2.070 KB/sec
?     root     unknown TCP                             0.000       0.000 KB/sec

I wouldn't expect there to be much running on a clean install and fresh boot.

Now start your online game. Before starting to play, go to its graphics settings and put it in "windowed mode" (this may just be deselecting the 'Full Screen' option) and adjust the resolution small enough (e.g., 800 x 600) so that you will be able to see both the game and the nethogs output on your monitor at the same time.

If you need to move the windows around and your mouse is locked (a.k.a. grabbed) by the game, push Ctrl+G to release it. Push Ctrl+G when you want the game grab it again.

Then start gaming as usual. There should be more activity in the nethogs output. Watch it long enough to learn what you can expect to be 'normal' network activity as you play. Once you notice that your ping rate is spiking, take a look at nethogs for any new processes or previous processes that are using more bandwidth than normal. It may take you a few times to nail this down. From here, you should be able to figure out what application is causing the issue.

I don't believe just killing the process is going to help you if the process is from an application that starts on its own. I am betting it would just start right back up again later (I could be wrong here). Instead, it would be better to figure out how to stop the application from sending/receiving data via it's own settings so you can stop the issue all together. You may even want to uninstall the application.

Let me know if you have any questions.