Ping "----" frequently

I can't figure out what on earth is wrong. I'll be playing, everthing's fine, F3 screen says I have a ping around 120-150, and then things will just stop working. Like placing blocks doesn't do anything, welding makes no progress, same with grinding. I hit F3, and my ping, and everyone elses ping just shows "----". It stays like this for 5-10 seconds, then all the pings come back and the game works fine for me. This seems to happen every few minutes. It's not happening to other people in the same game. I have a Windows ping running in a command line, and it reports a consistent ping of around 73ms.
From shift-F11, my sim speed and the server sim speed are always either 1.00 or 1.02. My FPS sits around 100, and UPS I see 60 or 61. While ping in F3 shows "----", on the Shift-F11 info I can see it bouncing around ~140.
I have no idea what could be wrong, or how to debug this. Any ideas?

Edit: I should add that I've rebooted my cable modem, wifi router (my computer is wired into it), and the computer.

 

You playing on a good server ? Couse sometimes the server it self sucks couse different reasons. I know this from my one just like it stoped working and then you teleport around and all works again... Or you slam into a wall... i had it all.

 

As far

As far as I can tell, the server is good. Nobody else has complained about this particular thing (I’ve asked), and when I use my laptop from a different house, it’s fine. I can only imagine it’s something about my computer or internet connection, but I’m really not sure what else to do to debug it.

 

What's the specs on the system you're using to play ?

 

GTX 980TI, 32GB RAM, SSD, Intel i7 4770.

I know the CPU is a bit old, but like I said, framerate and UPS seems to be fine. Is there anything specific I could do to make sure the CPU isn’t causing this issue?

 

Specs are fine... I'd suggest running the game in a less-than-full-screen-size window, while keeping windows Task Manager partially visible and keeping an eye on memory status to see if it's running into swap, and CPU usage to see if something else is going on that's soaking up the system resources.

 

Definitely not memory. It's happening like crazy, and I'm only using 14.6GB total of 32GB , with everything I have running. SE claims around 5GB used.

 

Does anything else appear to change on the task manager process view when it is stalled? This really looks more like a network/system issue than SE.

 

It could also be your operating system, hard drive may need defragmenting, programs set for auto-updates or something like Anti-Virus running in the background.

 

Not really, no. Network issue is what I was thinking too, but I found out something really weird last night. I was on Discord voice chat (not the in game one) with someone, and I got them to watch me while the ping showed "----", I figured they'd see me not moving, meanwhile I was moving around. But they DO see me moving, I just can't interact with anything, and clipping seems all flaky. So my inputs/movements are still being broadcast or whatever, but it's like I'm out of sync with the game.

I thought it could be something like that, but I brought my laptop home, and I'm having the same issues with it, here at home. So it feels network related. I'm going to take my laptop back to my GF's place and confirm that I have fewer problems with it there. Hopefully that'll help narrow things down a bit.

 

I'm the nominal administrator of the server Derek was experiencing this on.

Just to close the loop on this: the culprit turned out to be the gargantuan amount of voxel data we had generated by leaving meteors turned on (at NORMAL, but still) for weeks. You can see our notes towards addressing it here and here.

We ultimately fixed this by turning off meteors entirely, and then by temporarily turning the voxel cleanup settings up to a very aggressive level to remove the changes inflicted by meteors. We did not allow cleanup around grids, to prevent players' stations from being buried, but we got as close as we could within the limits of SE's voxel cleanup. This reduced the world size from several hundred megabytes per planet to around 15 megabytes for the Earthlike planet - still large, but much, much more manageable. Our players have not reported the --- ping issue since.