Speeds issue not ISP related, frustrating problem

Irish Steve

I'm going to post this in here, on the basis that it might make a few people aware of issues that are happening, but finding out why, and resolving them may be problematic.

My broadband is Wimax, which is not a wired service, but I have been using it for close on 2 years, and most of the time, the performance is as good as or slightly better than I used to be able to get from wired broadband, and it has a few package advantages that are not available from other suppliers, so I've stuck with it.

Most of the time, I get a ping of between 55 and 75 ms, download of around 7.5 to 8, Mb/s and upload that's clearly capped to the speed they offer of .5, as the test will run at anything up to 2 Mb, and then slow down in the later stages of the test, which I can live with.

Anyway, to the issue. Due to the size of the house and the other equipment I have here, the Ethernet connection from the Wimax Motorola device goes to a 100Mb 8 port switch in the office, and then there is a wired connection to a Linksys device that's downstairs, and that provides a second WiFi device to improve the performance of WiFi on the ground floor, and most of the time, this has worked well, and at reasonable speeds. DHCP is dealt with by the Wimax Motorola device, and there are a couple of things (printers) attached that are on fixed IP addresses outside of the DHCP scan range.

That's where it gets interesting, a few evenings ago, the speeds went out of the window, the pings were in the order of 3 seconds, and the download and upload speeds were in the low fractions of a megabit.

Then I noticed that there appeared to be considerable activity on the wireless side of the Linksys, so I switched off the WiFi connection on my Android smartphone, which uses my network when I'm at home to get reasonable speeds, and that killed the WiFi traffic, and over the next short period of time, the ping times and speeds went back to what I'm used to. I switched the smartphone back on, and the activity wasn't over much, and the speeds were OK, but over the next 10 minutes, the WiFi activity increased, and the speeds went bad again. The issue that was then confusing was that there appeared to be very little traffic activity happening on the smartphone in terms of data transfer, the packet activity was high, but very little data was being exchanged.

I started looking into this in more detail, but before I'd gone very far, a number of automatic updates happened on the smartphone, and since then, while there is still WiFi activity on the Linksys, the speeds on the broadband have not been impacted, they are once again in the area that I'm used to.

I am presuming, without being able to find out in specific detail, that an update on the Android phone was bad, and was causing the network to be swamped with packets without sending much or even any data, and the update that caused this was not intended, and was either reversed or corrected a few days later.

So, I'm posting this to give people a heads up that poor ISP performance issues may not as such be the ISP that is at fault, the smartphone wasn't hammering the bandwidth with data, but it was hammering the devices that are doing the communication to the extent that other traffic was being severely affected by that traffic.

The other thing I've noticed, which may or may not be related, Firefox gives an limited indication in the header bar of what's going on, and my understanding of that is that if the circle is going anticlockwise, it's finding out how and where to get the information requested, so doing things like DNS look ups and the like, and when it starts going clockwise, the data is being downloaded from the site that it lives on. Again, in recent weeks, what I am seeing is that the DNS and pre download phase is taking a lot longer to process than it used to, and more often than I like, is timing out during that phase, and when that happens, more often than not, a retry will produce the page remarkably rapidly. I have no easy way to determine if that's because my local machine has then cached the DNS information, so doesn't need to look it up again, or if the DNS software side of the machine has a problem that is causing performance issues.

What I do know is that the DNS slowdown side of things seems to be happening across a number of different ISP's, both wired and wireless, which is making me wonder if there is something unexpected, or just different, happening across the backbone of the net, and causing problems that are being incorrectly attributed to poor ISP performance, when in fact the ISP is almost as powerless as the rest of us to get to the bottom of what's going on.

I'm giving serious thought to setting up a wireshark packet capture on an old spare PC, but the time and work required to subsequently work out what's actually happening, and why, is something that I'd prefer not to have to get into, but it may well be that there is no easy alternative, given the unpredictability of what's happening to performance across the web right now.

So, before I start heading into a painful analysis of the "why", has anyone else got any thoughts on this? who knows, it might help all of us if we can get to the bottom of what's screwing up the web responses that we are getting.

Cheers

Steve