So I have been having serious problems with lag(connection ping spikes) on my computer.
I am using Mac Pro (Mid 2010), and I used the “sudo ping -i .2 192.168.0.1” command in terminal to monitor my ping. My ping stays constant at 1ms-3ms, but always rises to 100ms-200ms every 6 to 15 seconds. And these “spikes” happens literally every 6 to 15 seconds, but it doesn’t go crazy until 1000 ping or even over.
The lag hits me a lot since I am playing Counter-Strike Global Offence on Mac, which the ping spike can be clearly felt.
The weird thing is that I am not running any program that uploads or downloads, and the lag only happens in this specific computer.The lag doesn’t happen on my laptop and all. What is going on? My speculation of this problem is probably my computer appears to be sending out files or signals hiddenly, and this is when the ping rises, but I just can’t figure out what is going on.
The connection used to be fine. Is it a problem with hidden network features within my Mac or what? I was about to try to disable SSDP service, which seemed to be the cause of lag of few of my friends, but I just don’t know how to, since its Mac.
Any help would be appreciated.
Best Answer
I had a problem that presented very similarly to yours: excellent ping over wifi, except that every 6 seconds or so it would spike up to 100-200 ms. This was true regardless of the wifi network I was on, or the router hardware. I had no issue when connected via ethernet.
My problem ended up being related to a program which was regularly scanning for wifi networks. I found I could reliably cause my ping to increase in that same way by clicking on the wifi notification icon, which causes the OS to scan for new networks.
I looked in my wifi log (/var/log/wifi.log) and found entries like the following:
The application 'jtmc' (a diagnostic app for the Jive phone system) turned out to be the culprit. After closing it and removing it from my login items, pings went back to consistent 1-2ms to the router.