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How to fix a High Ping? (Online Gaming Ping/Lag)


HamitCanKilic

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About the Checklist:

 

This checklist talks about almost everything that can affect your ping/lag. Going through this can help you in identifying the reason for high ping. This is targeted to fix ping issues you come across when playing real time online games. As a league of legends player these tips helped me a lot in reducing the ping. I had an article on reducing ping for windows users’ long time back. I got so many feedbacks and I have collected everything in to a single page.

This Checklist is divided into 3 parts, high, medium, low. This refers to the effect of the issue on your ping. And just after the issue in brackets there is a letter (Easy, Medium, Hard), which represent how easy the fix for the issue

 

Key:

Priority Level – How serious the problem

Fix complexity – How easy it is to apply a fix

 

What is Lag and will this help to reduce it [don’t skip]:

 

Without knowing what is lag, you cannot know whether it is possible to reduce it. In simple terms, it is the round trip time taken to the server from your computer. This depends on so many things including physical distance and link congestion. This simply means, if you an Asian trying to play in a North American server you will get a large ping even with best configuration possible. Try everything in the checklist if you still have the same ping, that simply mean you can’t reduce it of your own, you need the help of ISP (internet service provider) and the Server hosting organization (in League of Legend sit would be RIOT games)

Checklist

 

  • Disable Automatic Updates (Easy) – These days almost all programs has automatic updates available and enabled. As an example, your virus guard updates every day. If it happen within a game, you are done. So stop automatic updates and do them manually when you need them.

 

  • Close any bandwidth intensive programs (Easy) – This point is straightforward but i have mentioned this for the sake of completeness (Example bandwidth intensive programs: bandwidth intensive programs, Voice over IP programs: Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo or Teamspeak, Video Streams: YouTube, Instant Messenger Video Chat, LiveStreams, Steam Game or Patch Downloads). You can always use resource monitor to identify the bandwidth intensive programs.

 

  • Disable Firewall/Add Game as an exception (Easy) – Your firewall is checking most of the packets sent from your computer and received by your computer. This process takes time (may be several milliseconds). Disable you firewalls (there is a windows firewall and there might be a virus guard firewall) or add the Game as an exception in your firewall settings. Adding game as an exception within the firewall will allow sending the packets from the game freely.

 

  • Move to a wired connection from a WI-FI (Medium) – I used to play the game with WI-FI connection and moving to LAN made a huge difference. This is marked as medium as this might need long LAN cables and some resources to setup. However if you are sitting near your router this is an easy process.

 

  • Overheating (Medium) – This is again an issue I had and from the firsthand experience I know this can lead to high ping. Overheating can mainly happen in two places. In your computer or in the router/other network devices. My computer over heats due to the hot weather and I have to buy a cooling pad. Routers are overheated due to continuous use and some hardware issues. Power off the network for several minutes before start of the play if it gets heated soon again there may be an issue with your network hardware.

 

  • Temporary Connection issues (Easy) – Restart the router. Most of the time there can be temporary issues due the router and internal congestion. Restarting the router will solve most of these issues.

 

  • Contact your ISP (Medium): This is again an important thing. I had several ping issues in past and I tried everything I know. After sometime, i got to know there was a big issue in the ISP lines. This might not work but simply give a call to them (line it total free right ?) and tell you are having a lag issue and ask them to check in to any problems in their side. They might look into it, or might not. Still it worth a try.

 

  • Is your internet connection enough (Hard): Sometime our internet connection is not enough to play online games. RTS (real time strategy games tend to use less bandwidth compared to the FPS (first person shooter) and driving games). You need to look into several aspects of the connection like reliability (QoS), speed and bandwidth.

 

  • Graphics Lag (Hard) – The granddaddy of all lag, this is the result of a general slowdown in graphics, and is a common occurrence for any gamer. Basically, your system just can’t produce enough Frames Per Second (FPS) to make everything feel nice and smooth. Anytime graphics lag happens, you’ll typically get a reduction in the responsiveness of your controls. Your actions take a fraction longer to be reflected in the graphics on-screen because it takes your system a bit more time to create each new frame of graphics and send it to your monitor. This can be fixed by lowering your resolution, lowering texture resolution, disable anti-alias and anisotropic filtering, etc.

 

  • Keep the drivers up to date (Easy) – It is important to keep you drives (Graphics drivers, network drivers, etc) up to date.

 

  • Hardisk problems (Medium): Defragment your harddrive(s) (Easy) – Some issues in the harddisk  can affect your whole computer. If you tend to hear some sound near your hard disk, area and you feel like whole computer freezing when accessing large files, there can be an issue in your hard disk.

 

  • Disable unnecessary drivers and windows services (Easy) – You might have to search on this as stooping windows service without knowing about them can be harmful.

 

 

Conclusion

Hope you have better ping right now. I will contentiously update this page and will make sure you there is nothing left-out. If you have tried everything I mentioned and if you ping is same, you might need to think of another closer server or might need to learn to play with the lag.

 

Example Video:

Spoiler

 

 

HamitCanKilic

Thank you everyone! 

Have Fun!

 

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On 14/12/2017 at 10:53 PM, HamitCanKilic / 25] said:

Hardisk problems (Medium): Defragment your harddrive(s) (Easy) – Some issues in the harddisk  can affect your whole computer. If you tend to hear some sound near your hard disk, area and you feel like whole computer freezing when accessing large files, there can be an issue in your hard disk.


From Windows 7, Microsoft has enabled that the disk defragments weekly. Because with Windows XP if you defragmented your disk once per month, it took a very long time.
Unless the owner of the computer, has disabled auto defragmentation. It is probably not necessary to manual defragment the disk anymore.
However if someone does a lot of changes to the disk daily. Then it might be a idea to change windows to defragment daily, as that only takes a few minutes.

Indeed, if you hear a loud tick now and then, it could be the harddrive is no longer reliable.

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On 12/14/2017 at 4:53 PM, HamitCanKilic / 25] said:

 

 

  • Disable unnecessary drivers and windows services (Easy) – You might have to search on this as stooping windows service without knowing about them can be harmful.

 

 

 

Here is a site  i have used thru the years..A very good explanation of all the services of what should and shouldn't be disabled..     http://www.blackviper.com/

Edited by Digitalwolf
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Not sure if this can be added to this or not but in regards to lag I've came across something that really helped me and a couple of others.

 

If you switch Steam to Oflline Mode MP will still work without a problem only with a Steam Offline message in the bottom right hand screen. It's not a complete lag fix and you possibly will still get lag but if like me you don't have a super powerful computer this can be a real game changer.

 

 

Steam.jpg

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Great job thanks ❤️ 

                                                                                                                                                                                                    1797472539_TMP.webp

                                                                                                                                                                                                       ---------------------------------------

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

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