Packet Loss Test

How to use

1. Press Start test. Kill any download or stream first. A big transfer hogging the line shows up as loss your connection does not normally have.
2. Wait about two seconds. The test opens a UDP channel through a relay and sends 300 numbered packets. Every packet that arrives gets ticked off, so whatever is missing at the end was genuinely dropped.
3. Read the percentage. You get loss percent, how many of the 300 came back, and your round trip time. Two runs beat one, since loss often comes and goes with whatever else is on the line.

Why test this

You peek a corner, get the kill on your screen, then snap backward and die. Or in Rocket League the car you were driving teleports into a wall it already passed. That's packet loss, and a speed test won't find it. A speed test reports how much data your line moves. Yours can move plenty and still drop the small, urgent packets a game depends on. Ping tests miss it too. They clock the round trip of packets that made it and say nothing about the ones that vanished. This one opens a UDP channel, the same unreliable kind a game engine uses, and sends 300 numbered packets through it. Anything that never comes back was really lost, not merely late. One run tells you whether the rubber-banding is your connection or something else, before you spend another evening blaming the server.

What the results mean

The headline number is simple: how many of 300 packets never arrived. Under 1 percent, you're Clean. Your connection isn't what's costing you rounds. Between 1 and 3 percent is Minor loss, the range where a firefight occasionally snaps and a shot that looked like a hit doesn't count. From 3 to 10 percent you're in Bad territory, with corrections frequent enough to feel constant. Past 10 percent it's Severe, and voice chat cuts out along with everything else. Underneath sit the raw counts, packets sent against packets received, so you can check the arithmetic instead of trusting a label. Round trip time sits beside them, measured through the relay. Test twice before you conclude anything. One run during a household download tells you about that moment, not your line.

FAQ

What is a good packet loss percentage for gaming?

Under 1 percent is Clean and you will not feel it. Between 1 and 3 percent counts as Minor loss: the occasional snap backward in a firefight, and shots that looked like hits sometimes do not register. From 3 to 10 percent is Bad, with corrections frequent enough to lose you rounds. Past 10 percent is Severe and voice chat starts dropping too.

Why does packet loss make my character rubber-band?

Your game does not wait for the server before it moves you. It predicts your position locally so the controls feel instant, then the server confirms it a moment later. When the packet carrying your movement never arrives, the server keeps your old position and corrects you on the next update. That correction is the snap backward you see.

What causes packet loss?

Blame the wireless link first, especially a crowded 2.4 GHz channel or a wall between you and the router. After that: an overloaded router, a cloud backup eating your upload, a bad cable. One tell worth knowing is timing. Loss that only shows up in the evening is congestion at your ISP, not anything in your house.

How do I fix packet loss?

Plug in a cable and test again. If the loss vanishes, it was wireless interference and no router setting fully fixes that. If it survives, reboot the modem and router, stop any large upload, and retest. Loss that persists on a cabled connection belongs to your ISP, and this result is what you send them.

Why did another packet loss test show me zero?

Two reasons. A test built on ordinary web requests cannot see loss at all, because TCP quietly resends anything that goes missing and reports only the delay. A UDP test like this one can also show zero on a healthy connection, and that is the correct answer, not a bug. If two tools disagree, check whether they ran at the same moment, since congestion comes and goes.

Is packet loss the same as high ping or jitter?

No, and they break your game in different ways. Ping is how long a packet takes to arrive, so high ping feels like delay between your input and the result. Jitter is how much that timing wobbles. Packet loss is the packet never arriving at all, which is what produces the snap back to a position you already left.