Slow Web Browsing, Everything Else Works Fine great pings etc

B

barakandl

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Joined
Jun 15, 2010
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I have a Tenda W311R Router, a windows 7 box, two xp box, wii, and xbox 360.

What is happening lately is web browsing is painfully slow. All computers are effected(affected?). My pings are great 40ms to google but searches take forever. I am able to download at my connections max speed (1700 kb/s). Starcraft 2 plays fine no issue, wii works fine playing mario cart.

What i get in web browsing is long delays when it says "waiting for google.com" "transfering data from hardforum.com". It just over 1 minute for it to load my gmail inbox.

Things i have tried... reseting the cable modem, resetting the router. Changing DNS servers (googles, scrubit, 4.4.2.2 all tried). Confirming slowness happens on multiple computer. It is rather frustrating but i can not figure it out. I did recently need to replace a router since my old roomate left with our netgear one. This Tenda one seamed to work great for a few weeks with no issues. It is defiantly a budget chinese router as there is lots of engrish spelling errors in the setup web page. No computer is running torrents or anything that would use up all the uplink bandwidth.

I have noticed in the past week some slow browsing at times but it was never that bad and intermittent. Last night and all today it has been really slow.

Any ideas on what to check? I could hook the cable modem directly into one of the computers but i really do not want to dig up cat5 or rg6 out of the walls or find a way to run a cat5 cable.

Thanks for you time

Andrew
 
barakandl said:
I could hook the cable modem directly into one of the computers but i really do not want to dig up cat5 or rg6 out of the walls or find a way to run a cat5 cable.
Andrew
Click to expand...

That would be the best thing to check next, but how is it connected now? Are the router and cable modem not right near each other?
 
Well it appears to be my ISP. I busted out a USB wireless adapter and hopped on my neighbors unsecured internet and low and behold he has the same issue. Good pings terrible web page load times. He is on the same cable service i am.

If it does not go away i will bug insight. Probably will not do too much good.
 
I tried open dns as my DNS server and still it is not any better.

I did get the cable modem connected directly to one of our computers and the issue is still there. Terrible load times on websites. Google mail takes forever to load yet i have a 40ms ping to them. So my router is not the issue (which i already proved by getting on my neighbors insight wireless).

I called insight up and that was a painful waste of my time. I talked to someone i really was patient with reading off a script. Basically 20minutes later they tell me all my computers must have malware on them and causing my browsing so be slow... Yeah right

Another interesting note.... I have tried two different bandwidth test websites. Each one i can complete the download test and it reaches speeds up to 3000 kB/s depending on the location, but it always fails while trying to do the upload test. Speak Easy gives and error message at the end of the upload test while speedtest.net download test finishes but upload test never begins. It just sits up preparing upload test.

Well i let speedtest sit long enough and it finally did finish a test



Insights DVR cable box software is terrible and i hear SBC's is quite good. If this does not go away we will drop insight. Pay way too much a month for bad service.

Anyone else have any ideas? Seams very strange everything else works perfectly except browsing is terrible. Large delays on "waiting for google.com" and "transfering data from facebook.com". Now also some times I get a blank html page that says "connection was reset connecting to..."
 
Almost sounds like someone in your neighborhood is pushing way too much data upstream.
 
did you talk to your neighbor to see if hes actually experiencing the same problems on his pcs?
 
I am on a friendliness level with my neighbors where we smile or wave but not a lot more. I suppose i could strike up a conversation with them. To be honest i am not sure which neighbor wireless i was able to hop on.

I like how insight gives us 15meg (or i think it is higher now if i can pull 3000 kB/s down) but only 0.75meg up.

I will be up very early tomorrow morning and ill hop on my computer to test speed. See if it is better at "off peak usage" time.
 
i would really look into removing the crap router from the equation and retesting the connection.

try doing this and see what happens... open command prompt and do

ping google.com -l 1500 -f
Click to expand...
if it returns "Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set" reduce the 1500 number to 1480 and retry. if that fails, continue to reduce the number by a few until you figure out the max packet size you can send without fragmenting. your router might be having trouble handling tons of fragmented packets, or your ISP is not allowing regular sized packets for some reason.

on a side note- be careful about saying you use other people's unsecured wireless without their knowledge, as that is not legal and this is an open forum. you never know if they are tech savvy and notice someone using their internet and report you. though the fact that they have an open wireless connection suggests they are not, the point is you dont know for sure.
 
I know it is not right to get on other people's internet with out permission but it was just a test to load a few web pages and shoot out some pings. I feel that is innocent, but the law might now. Think before you speak type moment i guess.

I get the same poor web page load times regardless if through the router, or cable modem directly connected to a computer. I have tested multiple computers all same issue. I got on at 6am this morning and web pages loaded right up. It is 6pm now and web pages loading like crap again. Not as bad as yesterday but still poor. Maybe my area is overloaded but if that was the case why can i pull a ton of bandwidth down stream and pings are great to online games. I probably do not fully understand everything that is going on.

I had to reduce to -1470 before it would not come back fragmented. I am not exactly sure what that means. I tried both through my router and directly connected to my cable modem. The results where the same both ways, works at 1470... fragmented at 1480.

87310547.png
 
Sounds like a contention issue. Unless you're paying for a dedicated line / IP, your connection is shared amongst many local users. In the UK, typical contention ratios for home users is 50:1, for business users 20:1. According to the specs, this is fine because a typical user requires "bursty" access, ie lots of bandwidth when requesting something, then nothing for a while.

Of course, that was true before P2P networks enabled teenage boys to d/l all the pr0n in the universe. If one of your neighbours has a horndog son (or daughter, who knows) running a torrent client or Limewire 24/7, everyone sharing the same concentrator will see their access rates hosed, much as you describe.

If that's the case, you may have to switch providers, and hope that gets you on different equipment, or investigate dedicated line / SDSL services or something
 
a congested connection is a possibility, but that dropped packet (request timed out) in that screen shot could point to a bad cable or something. you shouldnt really have any dropped packets. ive never used roadrunner myself but in general cable providers wouldnt want their networks to get close to saturated on a regular basis like this. try....

ping google.com -t
or
ping.google.com -n 50

(the first will ping until you press ctrl+c, the second will ping 50 times) and see how many dropped packets you get. it still could be a router error, perhaps the send buffer is overflowing and just discarding the rest of the data.

EDIT: just google mapped your town, i didnt know you were out in the corn fields in a town of 100 people hah. its very possible that your township shares a single small-ish connection because its not financially worth it to roadrunner to upgrade your area. the closest colo i could see was more then 20 miles away. this would explain it all, and unfortunately nothing you can do about it.
 
Columbus Ohio is a fairly big city. I live in a normal suburban neighborhood. I-71 is like a half mile from my house downtown is 10min down 71.

98881272.jpg


Appears to be a packet loss issue. 7% loss. This is my cable modem directly connected to the PC. Router eliminated. I even found a brand new CAT5 cable to try just in case the cable between the cable modem and router(my computer the way it is set up for this test)

I am pretty sure it is congestion. Works pretty good in the morning. Come 5pm to 11pm it is almost unusable. After about midnight it is ok again. What is weird is starcraft 2, torrents, downloads are not effected. Only web browsing is slow.

I am going to call insight again when i have some patience. If they do not fix it i am dumping them for SBC. I wonder if this new congestion issue has anything to do with them giving us 30meg(i pay for turbo) now or 15 meg regular. The speeds used to be 15meg for turbo 8 for regular.
 
Last edited:
Insight recognized i was having issues and fixed it for me. The never told me exactly what the issue was but i believe it was outside wiring near my house.

Their tech support came through but it took some time to get the right person to help.
 
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