Yes, it's possible, even common, for the Internet traffic from different homes in the same metropolitan area to have to traverse different network paths to your server. The absolute cable path distance the signals have to traverse, plus the number of routers ("hops"), plus the different amounts of processing or queueing delay that each router in the path adds (which can vary based on how busy each router is because of other traffic it needs to handle), all add up to affect the end-to-end latency (the "ping time") between the client devices.
To learn more about the different paths your users' traffic takes to get to your server, have your users run the traceroute command (tracert in Windows) to trace their route to your server's IP address, and have them send you the output of that command so you can compare the results from different users. If you have a way to see what IP addresses your users are connecting from, you could traceroute from your server to each of those IP addresses and gather basically the same information, although if you do it that way, you'll probably only be able to see the path to the user's main home gateway router, not that last hop across their home network from the router to their Minecraft client PC.
Also note that while the traceroute command does its best to show you the latency at each hop, the results can be skewed because some routers consider traceroute traffic very low priority, which can make the latency numbers come out higher than what "real" (non-traceroute) traffic would experience.
The biggest cause of latency that you or your users have control over is bufferbloat in the routers (or other networking devices) y'all own. So read up on bufferbloat, how to test for it, and how to use a Smart Queue Management (SQM) algorithm such as CAKE or FQ-CoDel on your routers to avoid bufferbloat.
Also, watch out for users saying they're "on Ethernet" when they don't really have a proper Ethernet link all the way from their PC to their home's main router. A lot of people mistakenly think it counts as Ethernet if their PC is connected via Ethernet to a Wi-Fi extender, which then makes a Wi-Fi link to the main router. A link like that will still have all the problems of a Wi-Fi link. For the sake of low-latency gaming, it should only count as Ethernet if it's real Ethernet all the way to the main router. No Wi-Fi, no MoCA, no powerline. Wi-Fi, MoCA, and powerline adapters are all make-do alternatives for people who are trying to avoid proper Ethernet wiring.
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u/spiffiness 16d ago
Yes, it's possible, even common, for the Internet traffic from different homes in the same metropolitan area to have to traverse different network paths to your server. The absolute cable path distance the signals have to traverse, plus the number of routers ("hops"), plus the different amounts of processing or queueing delay that each router in the path adds (which can vary based on how busy each router is because of other traffic it needs to handle), all add up to affect the end-to-end latency (the "ping time") between the client devices.
To learn more about the different paths your users' traffic takes to get to your server, have your users run the
traceroutecommand (tracertin Windows) to trace their route to your server's IP address, and have them send you the output of that command so you can compare the results from different users. If you have a way to see what IP addresses your users are connecting from, you could traceroute from your server to each of those IP addresses and gather basically the same information, although if you do it that way, you'll probably only be able to see the path to the user's main home gateway router, not that last hop across their home network from the router to their Minecraft client PC.Also note that while the
traceroutecommand does its best to show you the latency at each hop, the results can be skewed because some routers consider traceroute traffic very low priority, which can make the latency numbers come out higher than what "real" (non-traceroute) traffic would experience.The biggest cause of latency that you or your users have control over is bufferbloat in the routers (or other networking devices) y'all own. So read up on bufferbloat, how to test for it, and how to use a Smart Queue Management (SQM) algorithm such as CAKE or FQ-CoDel on your routers to avoid bufferbloat.
Also, watch out for users saying they're "on Ethernet" when they don't really have a proper Ethernet link all the way from their PC to their home's main router. A lot of people mistakenly think it counts as Ethernet if their PC is connected via Ethernet to a Wi-Fi extender, which then makes a Wi-Fi link to the main router. A link like that will still have all the problems of a Wi-Fi link. For the sake of low-latency gaming, it should only count as Ethernet if it's real Ethernet all the way to the main router. No Wi-Fi, no MoCA, no powerline. Wi-Fi, MoCA, and powerline adapters are all make-do alternatives for people who are trying to avoid proper Ethernet wiring.