Persistently high ping

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I've been finding over the last week or two that I consistently have an unusually high ping (circa 160) relative to the previous year (typically 40-50) on my Macbook Pro. Some things that might be relevant:

  • I'm using it in the same location as I have been for the last year or so
  • My roommate ran a ping test just now at my request, and found hers was about 80
  • I haven't yet had a chance to take the Macbook elsewhere and install it on another connection
  • I think I've been behind on software updates, but I just noticed that I could manually check for them, did so and installed them, restarted and had the same high ping
  • According the apple icon, I'm running Mac OSX 10.7.5, Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
  • We're on a Virgin broadband, not certain which one, though can find out if it's important. We've been on it for a year or more.
  • In case it's not obvious, I know little about computer hardware, and less about Macs
 

Raz0rEdge

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Welcome to Mac-Forums..

Pings usually don't matter..it's more your throughput that you are seeing with your connection. Pings will vary from test to test, server to server, and time of day and so on and so forth.

To understand what is going on, do a tracert instead. You will see all the servers that you are jumping through to get to your final destination, run it a few times and you'll also see that the path might change based on Quality of Service rules and load on a particular server..
 

vansmith

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Generally speaking, 160 is a bit high. However, that could be for a whole host of reasons. What are you pinging? Is your connection throttled? What are the details (up/down speeds) for your internet package?

I wouldn't worry about this. I'd only start to worry when you actually see slow downs. A ping is rather artificial in that it only measures how quickly a very small amount of data moves out and back between you and a remote machine. Since loading something like a webpage generally involves connecting to multiple remote machines, a ping targeted at one site tells you even less.
 
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mid '09 13" MBP 2.53 C2D, 8Gb RAM, 250 Gb HD, SL and Win7
Are you checking your ping through a browser or is this an in game issue? I can't see where high ping would be a problem outside of competitive multi-player gaming. If, on the offhand chance that it is a game issue and that game happens to be an EA title, EA has been hit hard the past two weeks by DDoS attacks.
 

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