Fluctuation of ping is fairly normal, it can be caused by many things, including, but not limited to:
- Peer congestion (i.e. providers with oversold bandwidth and/or network balancing issues)
- Routing issues (i.e. a connection taking a less than optimal route to the server)
It's usually fairly easy to see exactly where the problem is by performing an MTR (think of a regular ping test or trace route, just more with more information).
I just did a quick MTR from my local connection with ~500 iterations:
As you can see, whilst there was no packet loss throughout the connection, there is jitter. At hop #2 we see the best ping jump from 9ms to 45, with fairly similar results throughout.
For the most part jitter is harmless and doesn't negatively affect anything as most services such as UDP (like SA:MP uses) are fairly resilient and will compensate.
I also tested from around the globe and with the exception of China (who have really crap internet), the connection is pretty stable:
I'd like some more information here.
Could you possibly perform an MTR from your local machine to "sf-se.net" using
WinMTR and post a screenshot of the results here? Make sure to let it run for at least 100 iterations/hops.
To provide a good comparison, could you also provide one from another SA:MP server that's okay?
Also, PM me one or more SA:MP server IP addresses that's okay for you.
Thanks!