Hey all.

I was wondering what some causes would be of an increased ping time.
I first noticed the problem playing ET -- my pings would start off measured around 40-50ms. Then all of a sudden, I'd start lagging very badly, and my ping would be aroud 500-999 ms! If I unplug the router and let it connect again, everything returns normal.

With a fresh power cycle from the router, I ping google.com and get around 12ms. After a few minutes, that time has jumped to 900ms or so. What could be causing this?

This is a wired connection or wireless connection, all the (linux) machines on the network seem to exhibit the same behavior, at the same times. The router is about 4 months old and is a Linksys WRT54GS version 1.1 with the latest firmware. (I upgraded the firmware in hopes it would solve the problem. It didn't.)

We're connected through COX High Speed Cable net connection.

--Shade

Are you pinging continuously? If you are, there could be a device (router, switch, hardware firewall, etc.) upstream from you that is interpreting this as an intrusion attempt or pointless waste of bandwidth and is lowering the priority of your packets accordingly.

You could try pinging another address on your Cox cable WAN segment. If you're 23.5.5.5, try pinging 23.5.5.6 or run nmap to see if there are any Windows boxes "nearby" and ping them. The downside of doing this is that some providers might consider this hacking or might be going against your TOS, so you might want to double check your TOS before proceeding.

Shade - did you figure out your problem? I'm having a similiar issue in that my ping times start off well around 30ms, then throughout the day (not quite as fast as you) creep up to around 300-400ms but peak at 700 or 800ms. Ultimately the goal is a fast VPN connection. I've set it up, it works, authenticates, yadda yadda, but opening/editing larger files is a lesson in patience and pain. If you or anyone has suggestions, they'd be most appreciated.

Oh, and I've looked into the MTU issue. I'm able to run
before connecting to the VPN and it works just fine, which (as I understand) means the max MTU is 1492 after the 28 byte header.

Thanks, _S

/edited - addressed to phishtrader originally