Scraggles Posted April 21, 2014 Share Posted April 21, 2014 My girlfriend and I signed up to 150mbps internet and speeds are outstanding. However, when playing League of Legends I get spontaneous lag spikes. or so I thought. She doesn't do anything hardcore on the internet. Bills/Facebook/Browse the web. Just general stuff. I started to notice the lag spikes were happening at exactly the same time as when she clicked her mouse and would last 2-3 seconds. Roughly the time for web pages to load. I'm new to switches and she REALLY wants one hooked up. I'm all for her doing her thing, but the switch was KILLING my game! So, we unhooked it and everything works perfectly now. Is this normal behavior for a switch? She swore up and down that the switch wasn't causing it but literally the second we disconnected it, the problem went away. Not that I truly have a 'problem' to solve, as I solved it by just disconnecting the thing... but I'm curious what you guys have to say about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 Switches should not cause any problem.. Something could be wrong with the ports, maybe you had a issue with autoneg of your speed and duplex. What switch are you talking about, and how did you have it hooked up? How are you hooked up when you don't see a problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scraggles Posted April 21, 2014 Author Share Posted April 21, 2014 I don't remember what switch it was but it was just plugged into one of the ports on the modem. It was her switch. So I have no idea how she configured it Oh... When it was hooked up my PC was wired to the modem. Now that the switches is gone I'm still wired the same. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 Well, without knowing what switch it was - be it dumb, smart or managed? Was it a "green" switch that does power savings? Was it not really a switch but a router with lan ports, etc. etc. It is impossible to even guess to what might of been wrong. Here is what I can tell you for fact - switches are used in every single network on the planet. Every home soho router, wireless or not has a switch in it. That "modem" your plugged into is most likely not a "modem" but a gateway or router that has a switch in it, etc. How is she connected to your network currently? Another port on your "modem"? What is the model number of this modem? Data Centers have hundreds if not thousands of switches connecting devices together. If you want to add more ports to your network, you add a switch or replace a switch that has less ports with one that has more ports. Normally you can just plug one switch into another switch and bing bang zoom your rocking. Be it a dumb, smart one or even a fully managed high end switch from say cisco - they almost always default to dumb mode and just switch packets with no need of any sort of configuration at all. Yes smart and managed ones allow for stuff like vlans, igmp snooping, port mirroring or span ports, lag, snmp monitoring, etc. etc.. Could there have been something wrong with the switch - sure maybe it was flooding all traffic to all ports, maybe one of the ports you were using was bad, without some details it is just plain impossible to even guess to what was wrong. But 99,999,999 times out of 100 million there would be no problem just connecting switch from brand X to switch of brand Y and everything work just fine. If you need to connect more wired devices to your network - you stop by your local computer store or shop amazon/newegg and order pretty much any switch and connect to a port on your soho router/gateway and then plug your device(s) into the 2nd switch and bing bang zoom your cooking with gas! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LogicalApex MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 I'd venture to say that the only time a switch could be contributing to additional network latency would be if you've exceeded the switches packet processing capacity. The switch has to do something with each packet that comes in (on a simple dumb switch it is looking up which port the MAC address is plugged into and pushing the packet out on that port)... That being said, there isn't any way I can even begin to imagine you're exceeding even the dumbest switches switching capacity in a home environment... How are you even measuring this latency? Just looking at in game stutter isn't very explanatory. As BudMan said, without knowing a lot more about this "switch" there is nothing anyone can do to answer your question. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scraggles Posted April 21, 2014 Author Share Posted April 21, 2014 Ping averages 31ms when going fine. When she clicked it peaked at 999 for 2-3 seconds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 So again - is she currently connected to your network or not? Was it you took the switch out of the mix, or you actually took her machine out of the mix? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scraggles Posted April 21, 2014 Author Share Posted April 21, 2014 She is now connected wireless, the switch was the only thing removed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+John Teacake MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 Obscure Network Card make and driver causing a bug? Obscure Firmware bug in said switch? Try updating both... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 If we are just going make guesses ;) When you wired her to your network vs wireless, its possible here machine was saturating your internet pipe and causing you lag. While when she is on wireless she is limited to that bandwdith that is most likely less than your 150Mbps internet, which would be your download - what is your upload pipe - I have to assume way less than that 150Mbps download pipe. For all we know her machine is infected and sending out millions of spam message an hour as example.. Which on wireless is only a small fraction of your internet pipe, but when you wired her to a 100mbit or 1Gbps connection she was using up the bandwidth. Again this is just a wild ass guess since we have no details to work with. Aergan 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zidane Posted April 21, 2014 Share Posted April 21, 2014 If we are just going make guesses ;) When you wired her to your network vs wireless, its possible here machine was saturating your internet pipe and causing you lag. While when she is on wireless she is limited to that bandwdith that is most likely less than your 150Mbps internet, which would be your download - what is your upload pipe - I have to assume way less than that 150Mbps download pipe. For all we know her machine is infected and sending out millions of spam message an hour as example.. Which on wireless is only a small fraction of your internet pipe, but when you wired her to a 100mbit or 1Gbps connection she was using up the bandwidth. Again this is just a wild ass guess since we have no details to work with. As unlikely as some would think this would be...I've had it happen on a machine we manage not once but twice; at first things will be fine and then after a while the machine will saturate the network and bring the business to a halt. In my example, the solution was the network card was faulty. We had to replace it and then all was fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted April 21, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 21, 2014 ^ Very true, part of the reason I threw it out there as a guess is I have seen it before myself ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+InsaneNutter MVC Posted April 24, 2014 MVC Share Posted April 24, 2014 It might be the switch as strange as it sounds. I have a dumb switch which appeared to have failed after many years of use. The switch would still work, however when that switch was powered on it would just bring my home network to a stand still. Copying files across the network would go at a few kb/sec at the most. The activity lights on that switch would be rapidly flashing, all the time, despite anything been connected to that switch been idle. I swapped that switch out and the extremely slow network transfer speeds were resolved instantly. Network transfer speeds went from a few kb/sec, to almost gigabit speeds from my home server to other pc's around the house. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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