Switched to my own modem - high ping rate?

[willmore]

That’s unusually high variation. I ran the test in accurate mode on all servers and my lines looked pretty straight–nothing was all that near to me in network terms, but they were all clean–with little variance.

I prefer to use speedtest.net with a local server. For me, that’s given a lot better results. It was immediately different to see what my network connection looked like on cable vs on fiber. Cable is going to have a lot higher latency and significantly more variation.

Here’s the speedtest summary:

The three numbers after ping are the unloaded ping time, ping while downloading, and ping while uploading. Those help you see where your limitations are. If the unloaded time is high, then your connection is just slow. If either the upload or download ping times are high, then that direction is what is most limiting for your connection.

Note: don’t expect times these low on cable, DOCSIS has an inherently higher latency. Think of it more like WiFi than an ethernet connection.

[tokyotony]

I think I narrowed down the issue. I wiped my hard drive and Backblaze went into full speed upload to back up my computer. I lowered the upload speed and reduced the number of channels.

That helped a lot…at least according to my son.

[willmore]

You could probably see the effects of those changes by looking at the upload ping value on speedtest.net. Cable modems are asymmetric–they have much higher download speeds than upload, so backups like you were doing can cause a lot of latency if they clog up the upload channel.