Roblox unplayable due to extreme network usage, sometimes locking my ping at over 30k

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
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1

Now i know i made a similar post back in february about issues to do with this. but i wanna go over some stuff about it that might actually be useful

so, since last july, roblox has been practically unplayable due to an INSANE amount of ping i keep getting, which often leaves me unable to join friends or be in voice calls off platform, let alone have any other window open otherwise my ping spikes to a MINIMUM 5k

games often take upwards of 5 if not 30 minutes to load due to how high my ping is
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just to put my usual wifi speed into perspective. on a good day its usually over 10mbps, which is more than enough to play roblox

but me, along with several others are experiencing this issue with slightly different experiences. its not an issue specific to my device, and people changing routers or even moving house hasnt resolved the issue for a good few people whove tried that as far as im aware

heres some instances of other players experiencing similar to what im experiencing

roblox has also been using over 50Mbps of my network at times, which is 6.25MB per second. someone pointed out that roblox only accounts for 20kb of my network which is shown by this graph. its using up to 315x more than what it should. thats going to crash routers

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i also found out that my ping directly correlates to my network usage from this ss, as the network usage went up, so did my ping, and vice versa

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now i have found some potential causes for this issue, which i will list below

  • Starting a roblox game requires the game assets to be downloaded, which uses bandwidth. roblox tries to download as much as possible, which lags roblox a bit, which seemingly tells roblox to download even more at once, locking roblox in a kind of death loop

  • sending certain data to the client such as physics objects, or terrain data can cause lag due to the amount of data being sent over, especially by terrain, but even a hundred unanchored parts can cause upwards of 4k ping

  • loading/unloading assets in streaming enabled games, same as first issue but even worse

  • high player count. the more players in a server, the more itll lag since players use unanchored parts and have client data sent to the server, such as the position of all their limbs for animations (you can run an animation on a local script in smtn like starterplayerscripts and itll replicate to all other clients, even if you dont tell it to with a global script)

  • large part count (directly in part with the first cause)

  • client sided scripts. noticed a load of local scripts running at once lags your client, presumably even if the script isnt run for you

  • high graphics quality. this doesnt affect it too much, but lowering my graphics quality to 1 lowers my ping by a very small amount

my system specs are

  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
  • AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor
  • 16GB Ram
  • TP-Link Wireless N PCI Express Adapter
  • Windows 10

so my specs are just fine for running roblox. so its not my pc specs at all

this also seems to be mainly prominent on windows devices, presumably just W10, but W11 might also be affected. but phones, consoles, or tablets dont get affected at all, and OS’s like Android and some consoles run on Linux, and IOS runs on.. well.. IOS, but from what i know (and from what i can test), only pc is affected, but other devices do get affected if my pc is near them while im in roblox

playing roblox at all usually turns off my wifi as shown in the below images (First is roblox closed, second is the exact moment i opened roblox iirc):

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my pc running roblox can also force several other devices to disconnect, no matter the operating system or specs. its disconnected my phone and xbox a few times, and has even dashboarded my parents xbox’s once and theyre across my house. pretty sure its disconnected devices on the bottom floor of my house too

and yes, ive checked my packet loss, ive checked my network speeds, and it all adds up to roblox just… crashing as it uses too much of my network

please do also ask questions about this instead of just outright closing this, cause thats happened twice now in similar bug reports with all my information being completely disregarded. i might be able to remember stuff ive missed which could help

my wifi signal strength usually goes from 4 to 1 the exact microsecond i open roblox so it cant be a device issue, especially if several others have experienced the same thing

hell tried playing a game there and my ping got locked at over 35k for 2 minutes before shutting off my wifi

Expected behavior

Roblox should be able to open, and launch games with a maximum 2k ping spike while loading, and should sit below 250 depending on my server location without going above it

sometimes i think this also causes an issue where i just get an error 277 thrown at me even when my ping and network are just fine

got a better wifi connection (30mbps) and the issue still persists. joined a game to 115k ping and its now refusing to drop below 1k. very much an issue with roblox’s servers at least in the uk

A private message is associated with this bug report

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i literally cant play any game with more than a few parts cause it just disconnects me when using custom pbr stuff or meshes

as i mentioned

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like seriously how is this playable?
this from what i can tell has been happening to people since 2022

i have to manually disconnect and reconnect my wifi whenever it happens too

3

does this any of this stuff happen outside of roblox in other online games? all of this sounds like a faulty router or bad setup with your Internet service provider (isp) or bad internet path, sometimes the machines or cables between Roblox servers and you can get damaged and stay damaged for a long time which would make this a roblox specific issue but also not their fault.

my bet is on bad router because it’s affecting other devices in your house.

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i forgot to mention that

it specifically happens within roblox. not once have i had this problem while ive had roblox closed. only happens with it open. opening roblox usually sends my speeds from smtn like 12-15mbps straight to at most 6 the exact microsecond i try opening any game, which somewhat quickly resolves when i alt+f4

if i dont end roblox through alt+f4 or task manager, my wifi doesnt speed up at all or turn back on if its went off, even if i try manually connecting it which i usually need to do whenever roblox disconnects me

5

it sounds like your Internet is being throttled which is outside of their control and many other things you’ve mentioned is also outside their control, roblox doesn’t control the Internet between servers and you, that is the job of your Internet service provider and other internet service providers located on the route.

if huge swaths of people had issues at the same time like the studio connection errors often mentioned here then it might be a problem directly at Robloxs servers, but otherwise it’s extremely unlikely.

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i would presume its an issue with roblox’s servers themselves, cause ive seen people have this issue to the same severity on 50+ mbps , where theyve even stated it only happens within roblox and no other app, even if its more intensive on their network

and this issue doesnt just occur at peak hours or anything like that. its all day, every day. even at times like 4 in the morning im still getting ping as high as 20k for the few times ive been on my pc til then, even in single player servers hosted close to me with no more than 30 parts in them.

ive seen a few mentions that i should try using a vpn to play roblox to stop my isp picking up on internet traffic which ill probably end up trying just in case my isp is trottling

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i think a vpn did work, but at the cost of severely hindering my wifi speeds, so i disabled it

and now vpns might become illegal in the uk cause starmer wants to control us and what we see/hear

also the issue has gotten worse. almost cant get on roblox at all without my wifi being throttled to the point of turning off, where i need to alt+f4 roblox, and manually connect my router now. seriously. how does this get passed roblox

1 Like
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@thirdtakeonit thanks for noticing this issue, ive been struggling with it for over a year now and for the last 3 days ive been unable to open roblox without it slowing my wifi to the point where it wont let me open a baseplate

really hope this gets fixed soon

video showing how quick roblox practically turns off my wifi

diff video from what i was uploading but its still really quick

i had also already recorded this video and my sister was playing roblox so that was already slowing me down quite a bit, but it still gets the point across that it is in fact roblox

guess imma edit this one since somehow 2 messages spread across 3 days is spamming, but i noticed that several apps and conditions also severely worsen it

  • being in a discord call had my ping go from about 70-100, up to above 1k
  • poor weather conditions such as rain or low temperatures (which i never had issue with until last year)
  • other people using wifi near your device. one of my family members was playing rec room before going onto youtube. noticed that her loading stuff on either had a massive hit to my wifi (even tho shes watching videos in 360-480p which should be perfectly fine on my network and not hinder my speeds that much if at all)

just another thing to add too, this exact issue is VERY similar to a congestion DDOS attack. roblox quite literally uses up all of my bandwidth, not allowing other data through which causes the high latency and slow wifi speeds, and this issue has at times also disconnected or slowed down internet on other devices in my home.

i would also suggest moderators to check this every now and again in case i discover something that could be useful to engineers when it comes to fixing this issue

editing this message again cause i got warned AGAIN for a longer reply that i made exactly on whats below

right, so a day or 2 ago, i noticed that the network diagnostic menu thing was giving some concerning readings

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at a first glance it looks fine, but if you look at the “Receive KBytesPerSec” reading, youll notice a weird e-10 at the end of it. that translates to 271 with 10 zeros before it, and before i got disconnected the number of zeros reached 12. done a bit of math and compared that recieve speed to my actual network speed and its concerningly 1.5 quadrillion times lower than the minimum required to play roblox. the speeds there also started at around 400 kbps when i started loading into the server which is well within roblox’s designed usage range of around 20kb

so i have a feeling its to do with some servers that roblox is using having so much traffic that it kinda acts like a ddos in the way that it slows your wifi to the point where it just disconnects it from your pc, and attempts to disconnect multiple other devices (and sometimes succeeds in doing so). its making me think this is either to do with congestion on roblox’s side or another issue to do with the servers. obviously not a ddos but it looks quite similar to one

i also did have concerns that the physics packets were quite low, but i think thats just cause there were few unanchored parts moving around

should mention that the Receive KBytesPerSec stat is the only thing that was having this issue of speeds getting so slow that you could complete a trip to another star system before it finished uploading a 1 kb image (and no, im not joking about that)

^

been a couple hours and ive just had this happen again where the same reading reached e-25. definite connection to the disconnects im getting since i was locked at 9k ping while it was draining

11

Hi @Nathan30060819

“Receive KBytesPerSec” does look suspect in the pic and will follow up on this. We may have reporting issues here.

Regarding network usage and ping, we continually improve our network stack and its utilization to optimize the player experience.

Please refer to my note here: [MAJOR] Roblox made practically unusable due to extreme bandwidth usage - #52 by alphavoyager which was in the context of your earlier reports about the same issue.

‘Roblox Player’ does not control network state; rather, it is guided by the network state. Roblox player do not have visibility into what else is happening in the device and network. If you really want to understand whats going on, it will be best to have good monitoring of your network bandwidth, its usage by application and devices that are connected to it, reliability (latency, jitter, packet loss), network up/down events.

I will go ahead and close this, as the main issue in this report is beyond the scope of what we can practically do.

1 Like
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alright. hopefully it does get fixed since this is getting reported by other people at a much higher frequency than before from what it seems, and im sure a lot of them have FAR better wifi than i do that shouldnt be lagging at all. really annoying too since as i said, it just shuts off your wifi on your device for some reason

definitely something up on roblox’s end since its the receive kbps thats iffy. its just been getting worse too, most days last year i could play for ages with lag that was sometimes entirely unplayable, but now i quite literally cant open roblox without it shooting up my bandwidth usage and disconnecting likely my pc entirely. havent been able to play at all for close to a week now

thing is this was just fine for the first half of last year, then one day it just suddenly started doing it

my wifi also has just been generally really bad lately too (as in 0.1mbps bad) so thats obviously going to be a cause, but even when its not forgetting how to work it still yields a pretty much identical result. would very much try get this to whoever maintains the servers and see if they can spot a problem with windows compatibility since this seems to mainly be where the issue occurs.

have only noticed this on windows pcs and (to a lesser extent) xbox’s since theyre also windows. never seen or heard of any issues on ios, android, or playstation

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ive just updated this with another thing ive noticed since i actually have better wifi now due to an extender disk. its very strange since i wouldnt expect such a high ping from 30 mbps and then it being at a constant 1k. definitely smtn with the roblox servers in the uk. maybe a few other places too since i think this is being reported in a couple areas

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