Ping time/latency(?) fluctuates at work-Help please

Little background, I work at an overnight job, making sure all is well in my building. They do provide internet access to us (there's 10 of us, overnight workers/watchers, in this very small campus). I play FPS games like counterstrike, battlefield bad company 2 and MMOG like WOW, and EVE online.

The connection is, i believe T-1, the download speed is always at 2.7-2.8 mps, and upload is 2.5-2.6 mps if the ping is at 20ms.

The problem: Whenever I play a game that requires pretty good ping time, like counterstrike, the ping is always at 20-30, pretty good. But if one of my co-worker decides to watch youtube, Hulu, or something similar to it, it just crashes my ping time up to 350 or more and stays that way till that co-worker gets off youtube or hulu. I have observed this by noticing whenever my ping time crashes, i would contact my coworkers and ask them what they were up to on the net, and how recent they got on that site (youtube or hulu), and over the time (weeks), I narrowed it down to those sites or video on demand sites that my coworkers accessed whenever my ping time goes sky high.

so what i am asking, i guess, is if there's any way for me to grab ahold of whatever "bandwidth" or ping that i had before they started up their hulu shows, and keep my share/ping time constant at 20ms- that way throughout the night? Or no way at all? I read something like VPN privacy solution, would that help me at all?

Thank you for reading, and helping me! If you need more details to the problem, please ask away, I'm at my wits end about this, ready to strangle that coworker, but it's aint his fault anyway...

 

No, It's not your network to change.

 

shouldnt you be working instead of playing games hahahahaha?!

 

Of course your ping goes up. It's more traffic to direct.
A better router with traffic shaping (QOS) can help with it, but that's not up to you.


Also 2.8meg is either DSL/Cable, a partial T3 or dual T1 connection.
A T1 is 1.5 up and 1.5 down. T3 is MUCH higher (6 I think), and again the same up and down. Cable and DSL are fast downloading but much slower on upload. Your ping is extremely low for either.


Sounds like a crap router with no QOS or it's not enabled. Considering they are streaming media though, even that may not help unless it is tuned right.

 

Thanks guys, darn, i was hoping for a simple fix . I guess I will have to hope 4G sprint will be in my area soon, at least that solution should offers really low ping time, yes?

YES, im working! hahaha, just sitting down n keeping eye on the doors, really

 

I suppose you might "innocently" "suggest" to the network admin that you know a lot of the others are watching videos and whatnot on the network at night and that, while doing that might be ok, it might also be causing congestion on the network that might be affecting legitimate users - such as the computer science professors (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) - so the admin might want to consider setting the QoS settings on the network's routers to give lower priority to things like youtube and hulu. If it's just an "innocent" suggestion and they decide to go ahead and do it, you haven't done anything wrong.

 

He also might setup logging and see what else they are looking at or doing.

 

The OP probably couldn't, since he doesn't have authority to monkey with the network itself (and I doubt if he's going to go to the trouble of getting a network card that can do promiscuous mode). The admin could, but she or he might not care about the actual content of what they're watching given that it's apparently ok for them to be watching stuff in the first place.

 

guys,

Yup, done that, sent a really nice friendly email to Network admin few weeks ago, and I haven't heard from him ever since, and he already read the email (we use first class, so i could see history of the email if it has been read by anybody). But a update, tho! Seems like the situation has changed big time, my ping time lately has been PERFECT! ALL NIGHT throughout...

It was weird, after reading your post about "promiscuous mode" I knew i was way over my head... nonetheless, i started to explore my network card, first time ever, i saw a performance tab, and i turned on this thingy called "Adaptive Inter-Frame Spacing", and reading the description for it, it seems like something i would try to turn on. That's when i noticed my ping time got even lower??? from 20-25ms to 12-13ms!!! could be just a freak situation, causing me to think i did something right, haha.

Maybe you could shed some light on that adaptive mode thingy? if it is good for my card or no? In any case, I think the Network Admin did something that improved the ping time, it's pretty stable now, no more spikes to 300 or 450 ms in last three nights, I even asked my coworker to log in HULU, and it didn't even do anything to my ping time! yay. Although, now i am paying more attention to my network cards, very interesting stuff!!! There's so much stuff you could do with those adapters.

 

I meant the network admin could.
Which could expose anyone doing anything against company policy.

You know, like playing games on company time.

 

That is quite true. It is, actually, a bit frightening how much they can log, and how accessible that info can be with a sysadmin who knows how to use regex properly on text files.