Higher ping recently

Since a couple of weeks I face double the ping on lichess (I am talking of the value displayed after command cmd ping lichess.org in the windows menu not of the number stated in the lichess dropdown menu, that one is even bit higher). I live in a neighbour country of France (as far as I know, the lichess servers are in France) and have an expensive and fast fibre account that guarantees best connection – before I always had around 35 ping, on a worse day probably around 50 – since some weeks I am suddenly above 75 or 80 !
I have already restarted the router, asked my provider (everything OK with my line, no changes) and done a virus check (can be normally ruled out as the desktop pc is quite new and additionally protected by kaspersky). Browser does not matter: the same story on Chrome and Firefox.
I have tried with a laptop – again the same: above 80 lichess ping.
Then I tried other sites: chess.com – what was before 150 ping or so (us based), says now: time limit exceeded, all 4 sent packages lost but chess24.com is perfect like always: only 15 ping, same for chesscube.com: perfect ping below 20.

What this can be? Any changes on the lichess site during the last weeks? Did you change your server locations? Does the mass of games played (often above 45.000 players online) recently cause a higher lichess ping?

Anybody else with a higher ping recently?

Definition of ping:
The time it takes to send a move from your computer to Lichess server, and get the response back. It's specific to your distance to Lichess (France), and to the quality of your Internet connection. Lichess developers can not fix your wifi or make light go faster.

lichess.org/lag

I know what ping is

but as neither my distance to France nor the quality of my internet connection has changed, I search for other explanations

It could be that in your case the packets to lichess follow different route than it was before. You could play with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute to get the clue. The more servers in different countries are involved, the worse is the ping. If traceroute will show some weird hops, you should perhaps contact your provider.

Chess.com probably doesn't respond to direct pings, hence the error.

But I'm not an expert...

@epimer

thanks! Interesting answer...

I am no expert on those kind of things but here is quite understandable explained what the results of "tracert" mean:

help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/1550/~/traceroute-explained

There is said: "The Request timed out error message is usually nothing to worry about, as many network providers may disable ICMP traffic if their network is under heavy load."

In my case, when typing "tracert lichess.org" I got

-most time 9 hops, one time 11 hops
-half timed out (what means nothing, see above)

-the other half:
at first 3 hops with 1 ms, 1 ms, 14 ms
but then hop nr. 5 and 6 to france are as follows:

5 71 ms 72 ms 72 ms be100-1157.gsw-1-a9.fr.eu [91.121.131.153]
6 76 ms 74 ms 74 ms be102.gra-g1-nc5.fr.eu [91.121.215.176]

and I assume thats what causes above 70 ping

it seems the lichess servers are now in Roubaix, what is according to Google very north in France, at the border to Belgium. Though I live in a neighbour country of France, this makes a whopping 1900 km distance to my location.

If I am not completely wrong, I remember a lichess forum thread about the lichess servers in 2018 or so, and at this time the liches servers were more in the middle or south of France.

Did the lichess servers change to the north of France some weeks ago?

@Rob I would assume that .fr.eu servers belong to some large provider, not lichess.
Here is my traceroute (from Ukraine):

# traceroute -T -w1 lichess.org
traceroute to lichess.org (37.187.205.99), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 router.asus.com (192.168.1.1) 1.066 ms 1.625 ms 1.614 ms
2 x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x) 6.061 ms 5.942 ms 7.765 ms
3 x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x) 4.695 ms 5.839 ms 5.823 ms
4 x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x) 6.674 ms 8.340 ms 8.710 ms
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 be100-1166.ams-1-a9.nl.eu (91.121.215.190) 41.183 ms 40.626 ms be100-1167.ams-1-a9.nl.eu (91.121.215.192) 41.438 ms
9 be104.gra-g2-nc5.fr.eu (213.251.128.66) 47.125 ms be104.gra-g1-nc5.fr.eu (213.186.32.210) 49.173 ms be104.gra-g2-nc5.fr.eu (213.251.128.66) 49.357 ms
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 lichess.org (37.187.205.99) 47.096 ms 47.376 ms 48.151 ms

So the first server is my router, 2-4 belong to my provider (I hid the IPs), 8th server is in Netherlands and 9th is in France. Alltogether 14 hops, with a 47ms ping to lichess.

nearly unbelievable that you have 47 ms ping from the Ukraine and I have 80 ms from Spain with the fastest 1000 MB fiber internet account available over here.