High ping, packet loss, lag spikes and rubberbanding can come from three places: the route between you and the server, your own connection, or the server itself. Work out which one before you change anything.
Step 1: Find where the problem is
- Only you are affected. If other players connect fine, the cause is most likely your own connection or the route between your ISP and the server.
- Everyone is affected at the same moment. The cause could be the server, or a route problem shared by several players. See Server Lag or Not Enough RAM? to tell server lag apart from connection problems.
- It gets worse at certain times of day. This points to the route or your ISP being busy at peak hours. See Wide Area Disruption below.
To see exactly where the delay or loss starts, run an MTR test from the computer that has the problem. Sustained loss at the last hop, which is your server, is what matters most. Loss at a middle hop that clears by the last hop is usually not the cause.
Step 2: Things to try
- Fix a problem on your side. If the loss starts at your own router or first hop, restart your router or contact your ISP.
- Choose the closest location. Distance between you and the server is the most constant factor in ping. If most of your players are far from your server, we can move it to a closer location. See Changing Your Server Location.
- Try a different route. A VPN, or the Cloudflare WARP app (the 1.1.1.1 app), sends your traffic through another network, which can change the route to the server. It may lower your ping, raise it, or make no difference. Run the MTR test with and without it and keep whichever result is better.
- Contact us if the problem is on our side. If the MTR test shows loss inside the WinterNode network or at the last hop, contact our support team with your Server UUID, the MTR report, and the time it happened.
Why latency varies
The internet as a whole is not under the control of any one authority, and there are often connection problems that are out of anyone’s control. The sections below explain what affects ping and where packet loss comes from.
Distance between locations
The distance between you and the server you’re trying to connect to is the most constant and important factor when it comes to connectivity. From the simplest perspective, the further away geographically you are from the server location the larger the delay, or ping, will be. But more specifically, there are other factors that can affect the apparent distance between you and the server.
The general idea is that it’s never a straight path, and the path it does take changes constantly. So while you may get a good latency value one day, the next day it could suck. The same goes for paths of equal distance, especially when crossing country borders or large bodies of water.
Wide Area Disruption
The Global Internet acts as a massive web of connections, meaning there isn’t one continuous cable between every point on the internet. Even in your own home network you’ll connect to your router before connecting to another device on your network, breaking the direct cable connection between any two devices. In the Global Internet, each time that jump happens, the connection could have to change direction, speed, or even get dropped.
To complicate the matter, each packet gets to choose what path it takes depending on the status of the nodes. Pathing can get very complicated, but the general idea is that there is a system in place that rates the health of nodes on the network, both local and global, so that packets can balance the chances of being dropped, the speed of arriving at their destination, and the physical distance it takes.
When talking in regards to Latency and Connection Stability, this means that if any part of the network you’re making use of goes down or starts experiencing higher than normal load, then you’ll experience the same issues until either those issues are resolved or your packets can locate a better route. You may notice this during Peak Usage Hours when your internet is slower or you have higher ping. If you’re one of the lucky ones it won’t affect you much, but for some people or during some Peak Loads, it’ll cripple the connection.
Packet Loss
Each packet contains a discrete amount of data sent from you, the client, to the server. Packets can be lost or damaged between Client and Server due to any number of issues between the two points, but most of the time the protocol in use is able to make up for the Unreadable or Lost Packets by sending a new one. But it will eventually reach a point that you’ll notice the connection become unstable or disconnect entirely.
The bigger issue arises when you have to find the source of the packet loss, the best method of doing so is Running WinMTR. WinMTR essentially sends multiple packets to each stop on the route and tests its connectivity and stability. Ideally it’s one of the network connections under the control of someone you know, IE your router or a WinterNode connection, but more often than not it’s one of the many ISP zones you have to travel through to get to your destination.
If it’s an issue with your local network you can try restarting your router or contacting your ISP, If it’s within the WinterNode network then you should reach out to us and we’ll contact our providers to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but anywhere in between is up to the ISP’s who own those connections. They will most likely fix the connection soon, because they don’t want a poor connection any more than you do, but some areas are more prone to these types of errors than others.