ADSL performance

**NickFitz** · 26 January 2010, 05:21

Originally posted by Peoplesoft bloke View Post

An suggestions (and flaming, ridicule etc) welcome.

LOL n00b

Anyway, to address the important points:

Originally posted by Peoplesoft bloke View Post

I am renting a place near current gig and I have a 100.0 Mbps wired connection to their router (main house) - they use Sky broadband. I get pretty dire (web browsing) performance (we are out in the sticks) and so do they, but it's inconsistent. Sometimes I get good performance from some sites and rubbish performance from others - but not consistently, sometimes I can make a site that is reluctant to load by highlighting the address and hitting enter again.

As you can tell I'm not an expert, but I am wondering if the problem lies entirely further up the chain - am using XP patched to latest and Chrome browser - although it's no better on IE8.

If it's dire but inconsistently so at both locations, it's probably down to their broadband service. I assume that the Sky broadband that you are downstream of is ADSL, which can be pretty rubbish if you're some way from the exchange, as is suggested by the fact that you are out in the sticks.

The fact that two different browsers both struggle also suggests that the problem is further out. Varying performance from different sites could be down to a number of things. For example, a cacheing proxy could hold copies of popular sites such as BBC News, and be able to serve a response quite rapidly; whereas less popular sites might take an entire round trip across t'Internet, and a bottleneck downstream could clog things up.

If you go to Start menu -> Run... and fire up cmd.exe (or your preferred route to a Windows command line) you can probably use the tracert command (Windows equivalent of traceroute) to get some idea of what's going on - although be aware that some routers are configured to block it by default.

A typical use thereof, where the bold blue bit is what you type yourself, would be along the lines of:

Code:

C:\ tracert forums.contractoruk.com

traceroute to forums.contractoruk.com (89.16.161.127), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  192.168.333.1 (192.168.333.1)  1.897 ms  3.303 ms  1.295 ms
 2  blah-blah.network.virginmedia.net (123.123.123.123)  12.295 ms  12.356 ms  11.912 ms
 3  blah-2.network.virginmedia.net (123.123.123.124)  11.800 ms  14.007 ms  10.482 ms
 4  blah-479.network.virginmedia.net (123.123.123.199)  59.562 ms  19.976 ms  24.133 ms
 5  blah-999.network.virginmedia.net (123.123.123.186)  14.767 ms  12.259 ms  24.335 ms
 6  man-bb-a-as7-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.185.193)  13.290 ms  15.154 ms  15.731 ms
 7  tcma-ic-5-ge-100-0.network.virginmedia.net (212.43.163.226)  17.991 ms  17.033 ms  14.693 ms
 8  manap.net (212.121.34.71)  16.609 ms  14.781 ms  15.959 ms
 9  cukmain.dh.bytemark.co.uk (89.16.161.127)  15.783 ms  13.593 ms  16.194 ms

which gives a list of the machines between one and wherever it is (though I have modified that example to anonymise the route back to me). If one of those shows particularly long times, or comes up with "*" indicating that the connection timed out, then this gives you an idea of where the blockage is. (N.B I gathered that output from a Mac, but Windows' tracert produces identical output, or nearly so, IIRC.)

If it's somewhere beyond the current gig's router, and you can obtain similar results from their premises, then the problem is Out There Somewhere - you can report it to the service provider, and if there's actually something broken they ought to fix it. If it's just the remote location making things slow, then there's probably not a lot they can do

**Peoplesoft bloke** · 26 January 2010, 12:36

Thanks Nick - and for the reply on the domain names - very helpful/interesting

ADSL performance