Huge periodic ping spikes

[Coult0512]

For around the past 2 week my home broadband has been getting hit with massive periodic spikes in ping at seemingly random but annoyingly frequent intervals.

The spikes seem to only last about 30 seconds but due to several people in the house playing online games at the times they occur, the spikes are just long enough to cause complete disconnections to the servers of whatever is being used.

The spikes aren't limited to just one device, just wifi or just ethernet cable connections, as everyone using something online in the house will experience the spike at the exact same time. They also aren't being caused by any of the devices connected to our router, as various combination of different devices being on or off still have the spikes occuring.

I have no idea if it's a problem with the router or an outside connection but the problem has persisted for an infuriatingly long time now so I've somewhat concluded that it is no longer due to some temporary fault and must surely be something more serious.

[Andy]

Hi @vine36 👋 I think we will need to take a closer look at this to see if we can get to the bottom of the problem, if you could contact us by clicking here and we will be happy to take another look. 

[Anonymous]

Such spikes can sometimes come from unexpected sources.  We've had spikes here usually in the early hours.

So I think I've tracked this down to our Samsung TV.  It started here on January 17th, I've now turned off some of the permissions on the TV and it looks like last night it worked...  But let's wait and see!

*edit:  While this does seem to have reduced the Ping spikes (and the 40,000 DNS queries involved), it does mean that EPG (Electronic Program Guide) is no longer working!

[gipjon]

I use to have this issue really bad ping spiking all over the place even getting drop from GTA5 sever on the xbox even my sky q box use to say in the setting /network  connected to the router ok but also use to say connected disconnect connected disconnected to the internet like a yoyo . I would change the dns from vodafone to one of the better one . Like 

Google dns 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or 1.0.0.1

Opendns 208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.222

This can be change on the device. Good thing about changing it on each device is, you can use different dns on different devices or you can log into the router and change it there . 

Next plan is if that does not work .do you get the same spikes on wifi as you do on ethernet.  This is to rule out interference on wifi that come from things like baby monitor.  Motors. microwaves etc 

[Anonymous]

After some monitoring, I identified the cause of the spikes on the network here.  It would seem that a server a rather ancient BluRay player was trying to contact has been taken down, and as a result, the BD player was just spamming the site trying to get a response.

Solution:  I opted to just remove the BD player from the home network.  The other option I toyed with, was to set up an internal network sink for the requests, but as none of the other online abilities of the player are used, it seemed pointless!

*Regards changing DNS servers:  DNS servers have little to do with routing other than finding the end address, so in this case changing them would have little effect.

**I'm already using PiHole in combination with "unbound", alongside cloudflare and google DNS.

[De4thNoob]

What settings did you turn off to get no ping spikes? 

[CrimsonLiar]

So on the roughly 12yo BluRay player the solution was to delete it's WiFi settings and leave it unconnected from the network.  It's also turned off at the socket - no more ping spikes from it!