Can high pings cause slow web browsing?

Question

Lately my internet connection is having an issue of slow browsing. Download speed is perfectly fine. According to my internet provider, everything is fine with the connection. I just tried doing a ping test to some of the sites I frequently use. I am getting varied ping times between 200ms to 400ms. From what I have read, ideal ping is below 50ms. Does +200ms ping explain the slow web browsing I'm facing lately? How can this be fixed when my ISP says nothing is wrong with the connection?

Answer 1

There are a large number of potential issues and misapprehensions here, some related to your ISP, others not. I'll start by unpacking the main ones, then advise some tests and speculate on probable causes and fixes.

The ping time only reflects the time it takes to reach a site and negotiate a connection. Pointing at 50ms as being good and 200ms being slow is simplistic - one of the things about ping times is that the distance to the server can dictate minimum times - for example a fast site in Australia will have a ping time of more then 140ms if you are in the USA, mainly due to the speed of light. That said, congested small connections can have very high latencies.

Issues with latency can be caused by your ISP, especially faulty hardware, routing issues or QOS on their links - however most issues happen between you and the ISP or in the home network.

A good way to start diagnosing latency issues is to use (Win)MTR which combines ping and traceroute and can show where latency is coming in, as well as packet loss and consistency which can provide strong indications of congestion and other issues. I'd recommend running this for a while and posting the results here for interpretation.

In your case, absent further information I'd postulate the issue is one or a combination of 3 things -

1. A congested upload link. If you have a DSL connection you often have lots of download bandwidth and little upload bandwidth. If you have large uploads this can congest the link and slow packet acknowledgements and thus your connection (while having little impact on large downloads).

2. Your Wi-Fi channel is congested. If you are using Wi-Fi, this is what I would pick as the most likely problem especially as you mention variable latencies. Try plugging in to an Ethernet cable and see if that eliminates the issue.

3. It could be a compromised system in your network sending spam or similar. Try disabling Wi-Fi and only allowing a single device to connect at a time. If that fixes the problem for some devices but not others, suspect the slow devices as being compromised.

There are other possibilities, like firmware issues and DSL negotiation / line issues, but rule the more likely problems out first.

Answer 2

Ping is a measure of round-trip-time (RTT), or how long it takes for a message to go from your computer to the server and back. We call the delay the latency.

A fibre optic line between two offices has low latency, whilst mailing a hard drive has massive latency.

High latency will make it take longer for the initial request to hit the server and come back. The simplest of websites will require one RTT:

1. Client asks for a page
2. Server delivers the page

More complex pages also need additional requests. You'll only learn that you need to load stylesheets, javascript libraries, and so forth after loading the HTML for a page, so that adds additional round trips as well.

Even worse, these requests might be made in series. So you'll request foo.css, then bar.js, then baz.jpg - and each request will take a RTT. This generally doesn't happen, but you will still have resources loading in chunks - resource A says it needs B, and B needs C, and C needs D...

An example

With Chrome's dev tools, you can emulate a connection with poor latency. Loading a few sites with varying ping settings reveals how much high latency hurts. I measured the time taken for the DOM to be loaded, meaning that the structure of the page is known, even though images, styles, etc. might still be loading.

Also, I measured these by hitting ctrl-F5, which ignores cached data. This makes loads slower, but also reflects what should happen when you visit a site for the first time.

stackoverflow.com gives:

No delay (40ms): 350ms
200ms latency: 700ms
400ms latency: 1130ms

It looks like we need a few RTT's to starting showing something. Not too bad. We can also examine the time taken for everything to load:

No delay (40ms): 750ms
200ms latency: 2000ms
400ms latency: 4000ms

That's a lot worse! Now, a lot of this is really just the ads loading, but it still goes to show how important RTT can be.

So, in short: yes, high latency can make webpages load slowly. More complex pages will load noticeably slower, even if their contents aren't very large, because every request has a large delay.

Answer 3

Yes, high ping can slow down your website loading times. When you check the ping time to your frequently visited sites, your computer accesses the website's server then checks the time it took to get there. Logically, if it takes a long time to get information from the website, it will take a long time for you to access it in a browser.

As for decreasing this time (making it faster), eliminate unused clients on your network, upgrade your internet plan (switch from DSL if you have it), or get a higher performance router if you have low WiFi ping.

Answer 4

Generally speaking, no. High latency, what you are calling ping, should not slow down web browsing. You havent given much information on your computer or network, so everything is mere speculation. However, since you said your download speeds are fast, I am assuming your internet connection and internal network is working acceptably.

The first thing I would try is using a different web browser than you are currently using. Examples are Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. It could be that you have a browser setting or add-on that is causing the issue. If your browsing returns to an acceptable speed, then the problem lies with your original browser, which can be reset to original settings.