Ping is how long a message takes to reach the server and come back. Some of it is physics and cannot be improved by anything; the rest is worth looking at.
Why it happens
Light in fibre covers roughly 200 kilometres per millisecond, and the path is never a straight line. A player in Madrid connecting to a node in Quebec has a floor of around 90–110 ms before anything else is considered. No amount of optimisation goes below the floor.
Rough floors from our Beauharnois node
| Where the player is | Realistic ping |
|---|---|
| Eastern Canada and the US Northeast | 10–30 ms |
| US West Coast | 60–80 ms |
| Mexico and Central America | 60–90 ms |
| Western Europe | 90–120 ms |
| Brazil and the Southern Cone | 120–160 ms |
What is actually worth checking
- Compare players
If everyone has high ping regardless of country, it is the server or its route. If one person does, it is that person's connection.
- Test on another connection
Mobile data for two minutes rules a home network in or out faster than any argument about it.
- Check Wi-Fi versus cable
Wi-Fi adds latency and, worse, adds variability. A stable 60 ms plays better than a 40 ms that spikes to 300.
- Use our latency tool
It measures the route from where the player actually is to where the node actually is, which is more useful than guessing from a map.
Minecraft handles a steady 120 ms gracefully. What players feel as «lag» is usually jitter — ping that jumps around — because prediction keeps having to correct itself.
A server at 20 TPS with 150 ms feels delayed but smooth. A server at 12 TPS with 20 ms feels instant but broken. They are different problems and they have different articles.