Very high ping, almost unplayable

The past couple of days I've had horribly high ping in SL, to the point that it's basically unplayable. I'm on my college's network, however I've never had a problem running SL on it before. I am able to connect to SL, and able to move and TP and everything else...there's just a delay of a few minutes before an action actually occurs. The lag meter reports that Client and Server lag are fine, but Network lag has a connection ping time over 600 ms. My computer is as follows:

OS: Windows 7 RC
CPU: AMD Phenom 9550
GPU: nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512
RAM: 2x1gb Corsair Dominator DHX DDR2 800, 2x1gb gskill DDR2 800

I expect that my problems stem from a closed port. Is there a way I can determine what exactly is causing my huge ping? And what are my options for getting around it? Any help is greatly appreciated.

I have been seeing something similar to this for the past few months. Occasionally, my ping times are 3 or 4 times higher tahn usual. I have found no explanation either.

A little more observation has shown that my ping will from time to time drop to a more manageable level (anything between 10 to 100ms), but will soon spike back up to pings as high as 4600ms. Also, I have the same problem on my Windows XP laptop, so it's not PC or Windows 7 specific, which reinforces my opinion that something is wrong with SL's interaction with the network I'm on. Still looking for answers if anyone's got an idea!

Be happy. For several months in 2006 my pings were around 7000. Didn't get fixed until Comcast replaced the UBR7k in the head-end with a UBR10k.

I would like to know a possible solution to this one too, as I have the exact same problem as described by the original poster. My specs are completely different from his though, and initially I thought it was just the old computer I had to start using as my main one broke.

After reading this post though, I have started to doubt that it might be something with SL, as the date matches when it started for me too.

Normal ping is 150-250 (usually at 170, Im in Europe), and it jumps to 1300-5000 and FPs goes from 10-25 to 0.4-0.9. What I have noticed is, that I can fix it for a little while with changing resolution lower and back, bot it starts again, and only way to fix it is to relog. Graphics setting have no effect at all to the occurence of the high ping/low FPS.

Computer specs are (I had to ask from a friend who knows computers...):
XP Home SP3
Intel P3.0E
Asus x850XT 256 AGP
2GB memory
100/10 Fiber

Clients tried: SL 1.23.4, SL1.22.11, SL1.19.0.5, Cool Viewer 1.22.11, Emerald 1.23.673

I called mine and complained. They adjusted something, they said. Better now.

In my case, I was far below the promised upload speeds. Download and ping were actually within the range I pay for.

Here's a little update for others to know if/when they have the same problem... Atleast for me this solved the problem (atleast for now) me and the original poster described.

I reinstalled SL viewer 1.22.11 and Cool Viewer 1.22.11... No more huge 1300+ ping or FPS of 0.4 untill I relog. Going back to 1.23.x gives the same problem with ping and FPS after a little while (2-5 minutes).