Why latency is high

This is where comprehensive network monitoring and troubleshooting comes into its own. Network monitoring and troubleshooting can quickly and accurately diagnose and identify the root causes of latency and put solutions in place to reduce and improve the problem. Before you can do anything to improve your network latency, you need to know how to calculate and measure it. If you feel that your network is running slow, you can check your latency manually by using Windows.

Add up all the measurements, and the resulting quantity is the latency between your machine and the website in question. Then, check application performance to determine whether applications are acting unexpectedly and potentially placing pressure on the network.

Subnetting is another way to help reduce latency across your network, by grouping together endpoints that communicate most frequently with each other. Additionally, you could use traffic shaping and bandwidth allocation to improve latency for the business-critical parts of your network.

Finally, you can use a load balancer to help offload traffic to parts of the network with the capacity to handle some additional activity.

Manually troubleshooting issues across a large network can become complex, which highlights again the importance of network monitoring and troubleshooting tools. To check if any of the devices on your network are specifically causing issues, you can try disconnecting computers or network devices and restarting all the hardware.

Testing network latency can be done by using ping or traceroute tracert , although, comprehensive network monitoring and performance managers can test and check latency more accurately. Maintaining a reliable network is an important part of a smoothly operating business. Network monitoring and troubleshooting tools are the best way to keep tabs on latency, as well as the other most troubling network problems, packet loss and jitter.

You can typically set network standard expectations for latency and create alerts when the network latency reaches a certain threshold above this baseline.

Network monitoring tools can help you set up data comparisons between different metrics. This can help you identify performance issues, such as application performance or errors also affecting network latency. A network mapping tool can also help you pinpoint where within the network latency the performance issues are occurring, which allows you to troubleshoot problems more quickly.

By improving your network speed and reducing latency, your business processes will also make leaps and bounds towards efficiency and high performance. This comprehensive guide has been created to define network latency and to help identify, understand and troubleshoot the most common problems related to latency in computer networks.

The key takeaways are that network latency, jitter, and network packet loss can severely impede clear communication and universally affect your user experience. For further insightful information on network performance complications, download our additional guides on the full explanation of latency, jitter and packet loss:. We're committed to your privacy. IR uses the information you provide to us to contact you about our relevant content, products, and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

For more information, check out our privacy policy. Back collaborate. Platform All our solutions are powered by the Prognosis platform. Back Solutions for collaborate. Why IR Customer Stories. Partners Partner Programs Partners Hub. Written by IR Media info ir. Table of Contents What is network latency?

Causes of network latency Latency vs bandwidth vs throughput Other types of latency Reasons behind VoIP latency and how to address them Best practices for monitoring and improving network latency What Tools Help Improve Network Latency? Besides the limits of physics, additional network latency is caused when traffic is routed through servers and other backbone devices.

The typical latency of an internet connection also varies depending on its type. The study Measuring Broadband America posted in late reported these typical internet connection latencies for common forms of U. Latency can fluctuate in small amounts from one minute to the next, but the additional lag from small increases can be noticeable. The following are common reasons for internet lag, some of which are out of your control:. Replace or add a router. Any router eventually bogs down if too many clients use it at the same time.

Network contention among multiple clients means that those clients sometimes wait for each other's requests to be processed, causing lag. To fix this, replace the router with a more powerful model, or add another router to the network to alleviate this problem. Similarly, network contention occurs on a residence's connection to the internet provider if saturated with traffic. Avoid simultaneous downloads. Depending on the speed of your connection , avoid too many simultaneous downloads and online sessions to minimize lag.

Don't use too many applications at once. PCs and other client devices become a source of network lag if unable to process network data quickly. While modern computers are sufficiently powerful in most situations, devices can slow down if too many applications run simultaneously.

If you think you have too many programs open, close a few. Running applications that don't generate network traffic can introduce lag. For example, a misbehaving program can consume all the available CPU , which delays the computer from processing network traffic for other applications. If a program doesn't respond, force it to close. Scan and remove malware. A network worm hijacks a computer and its network interface, which can cause it to perform sluggishly, similar to being overloaded.

Running antivirus software on devices connected to the network detects and removes these worms. Use a wired connection instead of wireless. Online gamers, as an example, often prefer to run their devices over wired Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi because Ethernet supports lower latencies. While the savings is typically only a few milliseconds in practice, wired connections also avoid the risk of interference that can result in significant lag.

Utilize local cache. One way to reduce latency is to utilize caching in your browser, which is a way for the program to store recently used files so that you can access those files locally the next time you request files from that site no download is necessary. Most browsers cache files by default, but if you delete the browser cache too often, it takes longer to load the same pages you recently visited. Some latency issues can be fixed, but the following are latency issues that aren't usually in your control.

Spikes in internet use during peak usage times of day often cause lag. The nature of this lag varies by the service provider and the geographic location. Other than moving locations or changing internet service, an individual user can't avoid this kind of lag. Online multiplayer games, websites, and other client-server network applications use shared internet servers. If these servers become overloaded with activity, the clients experience lag.

Satellite, fixed wireless broadband , and other wireless internet connections are susceptible to signal interference from the rain. Wireless interference causes network data to be corrupted in transit, causing lag from re-transmission delays. But which one is more fatal and crippling for your website? Latency is one of the most important factors that impacts the speed of the network. Latency is measured by the time it takes for a packet of data to travel from a client device to a website server and come back.

A low latency network connection is one that generally experiences small delay times, while a high latency connection generally suffers from long delays. Latency is also referred to as a ping rate and typically measured in milliseconds ms. Excessive latency creates bottlenecks that prevent data from filling the network pipe, thus decreasing effective bandwidth. The impact of latency on network bandwidth can be temporary lasting a few seconds or persistent constant depending on the source of the delays.

Think of latency as a journey on a road. The longer the road is, the longer will it take you to travel or reach your destination. If the road is shorter, your trip will be shorter and you will reach your intended destination quickly.

If we use the same analogy, then the width of the road can be compared to bandwidth. The wider the road is, the easier it is for more traffic to travel on the road at the same time. Latency is affected by the type of connection, distance between the user and the server and the width of bandwidth. The Internet connection is impacted by the type of service you use to access the Internet. This is how latency can affect your browsing:. However, it will take a lot of time for the web page to load completely.

While the information in text will be loaded quickly, images will be shown to the user one-by-one. Depending on the size of the images, the images will load in a phased gradual manner. Distance : The closer you are to the server, the faster the information gets to you. CDNs enable enterprises to place servers where their maximum users reside.

CDNs are extremely popular and are used by enterprises that receive large amounts of traffic on their websites. Bandwidth: I f you have small bandwidth, you are more likely to experience congestion which means a slower Internet connection. As one can see, Internet latency can be caused by multiple factors. Besides the distance between the computer and the servers that are serving information, Internet latency can also be due to the type of Internet connection used.