Broadband false speed results

ColmH81

I was just wondering, is it possible to get a false reading when doing a speed test on my broadband?? Ping is about 39ms, download speed is 7Mb and upload speed is about 0.7Mb..

But f@ck me, my Internet seems as slow as anything...

Irish Steve

Depending on who your ISP is, the issue may not be the speed of the transfers, it could be the speed that the ISP's hardware and systems are resolving things like DNS lookups and returning the result to you, and you have zero control over that, other than possibly using a different DNS provider.

There are packages out there that will check the speeds of each stage of the link to the sites you are accessing, and display the result, things like visualroute, among others, will give you some ideas about what's happening to your connects.

There are some other possibilities, your own machine may be running slower than normal, possibly because of malware or a virus, so a check there may be in order

Your hard drive may have become significantly fragmented, and if the drive is spending a lot of time hopping the heads all over the disc surface, that could be slowing things down.

The last possible on your machine is that your browser's cache may be large, so it's spending a lot of time updating the index of items that are in the cache, which again, will slow things down.

On the hardware side, it's possible that something like an Anti Virus package has been updated recently and is now using more memory than it used to, and that increase is just enough to tip the balance between being OK and spending a lot of time (with performance implications) swapping files from memory to the swap file on disc, which is a horribly slow procedure.

Or, it could be a combination of all of these, which will be noticeable in the end result

The other distinct possibility is that your ISP's systems may be suffering from an external attack that is designed to swamp the hardware with so many requests that it ends up falling over due to overload, and they are happening more often than we get to hear about, ISP's are understandably reluctant to talk about issues that affect their performance and reliability when compared to other suppliers.

So, the speed test can be reasonable, but some or all of the above can still result in a system that's as interesting as watching paint dry, and working out which of them is responsible can sometimes be quite challenging.

Hope the thoughts help with diagnosing it.

Cheers

ColmH81

Irish Steve wrote: »

Depending on who your ISP is, the issue may not be the speed of the transfers, it could be the speed that the ISP's hardware and systems are resolving things like DNS lookups and returning the result to you, and you have zero control over that, other than possibly using a different DNS provider.

There are packages out there that will check the speeds of each stage of the link to the sites you are accessing, and display the result, things like visualroute, among others, will give you some ideas about what's happening to your connects.

There are some other possibilities, your own machine may be running slower than normal, possibly because of malware or a virus, so a check there may be in order

Your hard drive may have become significantly fragmented, and if the drive is spending a lot of time hopping the heads all over the disc surface, that could be slowing things down.

The last possible on your machine is that your browser's cache may be large, so it's spending a lot of time updating the index of items that are in the cache, which again, will slow things down.

On the hardware side, it's possible that something like an Anti Virus package has been updated recently and is now using more memory than it used to, and that increase is just enough to tip the balance between being OK and spending a lot of time (with performance implications) swapping files from memory to the swap file on disc, which is a horribly slow procedure.

Or, it could be a combination of all of these, which will be noticeable in the end result

The other distinct possibility is that your ISP's systems may be suffering from an external attack that is designed to swamp the hardware with so many requests that it ends up falling over due to overload, and they are happening more often than we get to hear about, ISP's are understandably reluctant to talk about issues that affect their performance and reliability when compared to other suppliers.

So, the speed test can be reasonable, but some or all of the above can still result in a system that's as interesting as watching paint dry, and working out which of them is responsible can sometimes be quite challenging.

Hope the thoughts help with diagnosing it.

Cheers

Cheers... Seems to be lagging on my tablet and phone.. So I think the best option is your first suggestion...