Slow HTTP, speedy downloads.

[magenta088]

Hello,

For the past week or two I've been having really slow internet browsing. It stays loading forever, and there's only a handful of sites that actually work without any problems. (Including this one, sometimes ) and I have no idea what's causing it.

I've had various tech support staff tell me there's something wrong with the area yet nothing is posted on the Service Status, and my neighbour accross the street isn't experiencing any problems even though being connected to the same UBR.

wget of http://www.ebuyer.com ->

--20:39:58--  http://www.ebuyer.com:80/
  (try:20) => `index.html.3'
Connecting to www.ebuyer.com:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
End of file while parsing headers.
Giving up.

Any idea what the bolded text means/could be caused by?

ping to ebuyer.com ->

Pinging ebuyer.com [89.107.41.34] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 89.107.41.34: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=55
Reply from 89.107.41.34: bytes=32 time=74ms TTL=55
Reply from 89.107.41.34: bytes=32 time=73ms TTL=55
Reply from 89.107.41.34: bytes=32 time=78ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 89.107.41.34:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 73ms, Maximum = 90ms, Average = 78ms

Traceroute is normal too.

The strange thing is that I can download from a number of sources and can get full 20mbit downloads. I can also play games such as TF2 and UT2K4 without much trouble. All in all I'm sick of the crappy techies that haven't got a clue - and the thought of explaining the stuff about missing headers to them turns my stomach. I've tried everything that could have been causing it from my end - routers, firewalls etc. I even tried loading up a page on a freshly installed XP without any luck.

Anyone here that can shed some light?

[dev]

i've rarely been able to go to ebuyer.com, never seems to work for me

as for the bolded text, when you visit a web page, the server gives info back in "headers". these are simply singe lines of text, after the headers a blank line is sent and then anything after that is the content of the page requested. the bolded text would mean the connection is either lost during the time the headers are sent, or the response from ebuyer isn't what its meant to be

[Mick Fisher]

VM switched off all the proxies but never put any increased capacity in to soak up the extra load, apparently. This might be causing your issue. There is still a proxy you can use but the address escapes me depite trying to find it in other threads . Perhaps some other user will enlighten us . Also try using http://www.opendns.com/

HTH
The proxy is webcache.virginmedia.com port 8080

[magenta088]

I used ebuyer as an example as it was the site I could freely access before the problems happened I know what a header is, I just don't know why it's problematic for me.

Even things such as: www.blah.website.com/file.exe download at full speed instantly, but www.blah.website.com/index.php would take either 5+ minutes to load and more than likely time out.

I gave OpenDNS a whirl even knowing that DNS wasn't the problem - and it's still the same. Thanks for the suggestion anyways. Your proxy theory seems like a likely culprit though.

---------- Post added at 21:45 ---------- Previous post was at 21:37 ----------

The proxy doesn't help at all either. :/

Sorry for posting again, but the ajax edit script got bored of waiting and wouldn't load.

[Mick Fisher]

Originally Posted by magenta088

The proxy doesn't help at all either. :/

Pity, well that's me out of suggestions, sorry.

[ambc_666]

Originally Posted by magenta088

I've had various tech support staff tell me there's something wrong with the area yet nothing is posted on the Service Status, and my neighbour accross the street isn't experiencing any problems even though being connected to the same UBR.

there could be something wrong over your cable, possibly high tx load or poor snr issue. doesnt matter if your neighbour is on the same ubr, its the cable that you need to look for. the service status and the stauts line only show higher priorities like loss of service here and there and issues that are going to be fixed within a short period of time. for high tx load for example they need to upgrade the ubr which they need to plan etc and it can take a while.

if there is a fault its probably likely to be poor snr, you have high ping times which shows there is a problem, they shouldnt probably go over 50ms on average. have you tried a netstat to see what is shows as running? tbh if your downloading at 20meg and you are having these problems at the same time its very unlikely to be vm's fault. more so something with your comp or router. have you tried modem directly to computer to see if you still get the issue?

[magenta088]

I've tried all that.

It's not running applications since the clean XP had nothing installed.
I've tried connecting straight to my modem.
I've tried different computers (the two I use and my sister's laptop)

If it's a SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio?) issue, how do I go about getting it sorted? All I know is that it's nothing to do with my network or my computers.

[ambc_666]

if its a snr issue then you need to basically wait until its fixed, its something the outage team needto deal with, if you keep phoning up and pestering them it does seem to get the job done if they keep telling you theres an outage ask questions about it, ask for the remedy and phone up every few days and check on it, a pain i know but there is nothing more the agent can actually do. i dont think people actually understand that when they phone up.

i know the 25p per min if off putting but for an outage the call should be refunded, if its not its just a case of phoning cust serv and complaining or cust relations and complaining, both will credit back for the call.

to be honest sounds like its network related, if you have tried it on 2 pc's modem>pc then its not your end.

[magenta088]

Small update, maybe can spark some more ideas

I just tried uploading a file via FTP to my PWP and it seems there's a very large chunk missing from my upload bandwidth that isn't being effected by computers on my network. (I tried the fresh installation of XP)

I've been uploading a 500k file now for 7 minutes, and it's at 20% - it sends short busts of 1-3KB/s and stays at 0.0KB/s the rest of the time.

Do I need to get an engineer out?