OT: bit of internet speed research help please

[Owain]

Sorry, forgot to mention 'good honest broadband from Yorkshire' ADSL2+ ADSL Speed (DS/US) 16600/1113 Kbps

Owain

[John Rumm]

The Telegraph front page does not seem to have anything like the impact... even on my crap connection, it only adds a couple of noticeable delays:

Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=39ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=256ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=105ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=55 Reply from 212.58.244.67: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=55

Same here, but lop a digit off the end of both of those ;-)

(much the same on my other IDNet line as well)

[Martin Brown]

[snip]

Also from North Yorkshire although only basic ASDL2 on a small exchange out in the sticks and at the end of a long old wire. However, I was surprised to note that my ping times are almost half that of some of the faster connections (traffic shaping perhaps?). 10ms less than yours.

Neighbouring village their ADSL is so bad that some of them would be better off with bonded ISDN - they don't even get 128kbps downloads. Being on the wrong side of the beck costs about 2Mbps...

Here is a traceroute result showing 15-16ms delay to reach BBC.

Tracing route to bbc-vip116.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.71] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 26 ms

[David WE Roberts]

Fascinating stuff. It does seem to show that not all the links tested have the headroom to maintain ping performance when under heavy load. Which I guess is logical - you should be able to max out most links if you try hard enough. [This is sometimes known as a (Distributed)Denial of Service attack :-)]

So your client seems to have proved that the link is not man enough to carry the load that is desired under the chosen operating conditions.

So choice is to pay for a much faster link or address the application problems.

Or reduce the non-essential load on the link (traffic shaping?).

Or confirm that the real problem is that the ping slow down is really buggering up the scores when someone goes online gaming.

Cheers

Dave R

[John Rumm]

In fact, not quite the same here - no ADSL2, just vanilla rate adaptive ADSL

You probably have interleaving turned off, or at least set to a lower depth (you can check in the +net control panel). It decreases response times at the expense of poorer error correction.

Make you wonder what the line length must be there then! (we are about

6km of wire here - and currently get 1.5 ish Mb/sec, although have had up to 2.4 at times)

[John Rumm]

Indeed - its much as you would expect. In a first come first served arrangement, if the link is busy doing one thing, it can't be doing the other ;-)

Kind of, although ping flood usually needs to be *much* worse to actually knacker normal web traffic.

Not really - the worst delay the are seeing is a couple of 100ms, which as the results here demonstrate, is not exceptional. Also these sorts of delays will have little effect on most non time critical internet apps - especially as they are only intermittent.

The latter would obviously be the "right" solution, but that is not under our control (other than by persuading the client to ditch it and go to a competitor's offering). However there is more investigation to be done since problems seem worse at this office than at others, and there are others with slower broadband connections.

(the app in question runs not only the web "front end" but also does a fair amount of database replication between local and remote ends. Alas they do it all hidden in a port 80 connection - so we can't even set QoS parameters easily to give priority to the sensitive traffic)

The faster link is not an easy option either alas - no fibre or cable options where they are...

Yup, that is an option (although made harder by the apps design) - I can either load balance traffic to the other connection, or even route on a per IP basis to give preference to the local machines doing most of the work.

;-)

They had real problems once - turned out to be a new member of staff had installed a bit torrent client, and was slurping things like the bluray version of avatar. Pretty much knackered internet access for everyone, and started triggering excess bandwidth use charges (they were on a bundle offering where you paid extra if you went over your pre agreed limit). Still it would have been cheaper if he had bought it at a shop by the time they deducted these from his salary, and booted him out the door!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah The modern equivalent of a problem a customer reported about ten years ago 'email seems tyo have stopped working' = they had a 64k leased line...connected to our mail server.

I got back 'do you think the 50Mbyte 'movie of my new baby' sent by one of your staff members to about 100 other peoples is something I should delete?'

[John Rumm]

Had one like that the other day - "my email seems really slow, is there something wrong with the system?". Had a look at the machine, noted the

26,000 messages in his inbox (and more in deleted folders etc), and suggested that a clear out might be in order!

[Andrew Gabriel]

We had someone email a CD image to half the company, and the mail system had no concept of shared attachments...

[David WE Roberts]

+1 :-) Dragged and dropped the picture of the CD on his PC to an email, not realising that this took the whole CD contents as an attachment. Maximum size for attachments was set soon afterwards.

[Rick Hughes]

Here you go: Pinging

[212.58.244.66] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=184ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=179ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=120ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=178ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=128ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=212ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=130ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=112ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=133ms TTL=50 Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=195ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 212.58.244.6

You can see the point I loaded the page BTW ... page loaded OK with no pixellation or delay ..

I am on a pretty crap BT residential link - currently:

3.44 Mbps download 612kbps

On what is supposed to be up to 8Mbps service.

[Jules Richardson]

(perhaps) interesting to note that it doesn't really make a difference for me here in US-land; I get ping times of around 107ms to the beeb with a brief blip up to 129ms when loading the DM page.

That's just plain ol' cable. Bugger knows what my ISP is doing, though; one of those online speed test sites gives me 2.7Mbps download but a hefty 7.5Mbps upload, which seems completely backwards to what I'd expect.

cheers

Jules

[soup]

2nd attempt as I got completely the wromg end of the stick

I couldn't undestand how everyone was getting streams of ping results then I realised there must be some command to send continous pings. So googled a bit found the -t switch so used that then I re-read your post and realised you'd already posted that in ypour OP.

VM cable at UP TO 10Mb

[John Rumm]

You would need to substitute a more local server to ping...

Some of the cable services are not (as) asymmetric like ADSL - however the traffic they carry will be, so upload performance can actually be pretty decent in those cases.

[Andy Burns]

I'd suggest 'ping -t

' would tend to find a local server regardless of where you happen to be ...

[Toby]

On 02/07/2012 18:07, John Rumm wrote:

BeThere ADSL2+ Annex M with frantic clicking on the Daily Fail site about 5 pings in!

DownStream Connection Speed 20256 kbps UpStream Connection Speed 2364 kbps

Pinging

[212.58.246.92] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=84ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56 Reply from 212.58.246.92: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56