Maximo Park english mp3 song - Books from Boxes, The Unshockable, Our Velocity...

My ping testing showed unusual packet loss to several different sites on 8/25/05. Sure the response time was low... when the ping packet was returned.

Level3.net seems to be a company that plays a big part in Internet infrastructure and was dropping a lot packets in my traceroute and pathping tests.

I tested from my company's T1 as well as a nearby DSL line with identical results. I also checked with my parents later that day, and they claimed that each of their companies had similarly uncommon complaints about "slow computers" which I'm assuming translates to slow Internet.

I searched Google for any information on what might have cause the slowdown and came up with nothing. I visited internettrafficreport.com and scoreboard.keynote.com (Internet health report) and both sites said everything was perfect.

I checked again late that night from my home cable connection and remotely from my works T1 and found that packets were no longer dropping.

The only explanation: conspiracy ...or the Internet was slow for a day and nobody cared except for you and me ;-)

Matt

Hey there -

Sounds like DNS is a reasonable place to poke around given the symptoms that you're seeing. All of what I'm suggesting is pretty obvious (and not of much use if the problem is gone already), so may not be too useful, but just in case...

DNS would seem a likely culprit to me if you answer yes to most or all of the questions below:

- Is a given site slow to load the first time around, but quicker
(for a while) thereafter?
- Is the total query time returned for 'dig any yahoo.com' or
similar up above about 10msec?
- If you add a site to your hosts file, does it consistently
load quickly?

W.B. McNamara
http://seamonkeyrodeo.blogspot.com

Have you considered setting up a DNS cache (ala djbdns)? I have cable as well and found that using a DNS cache made it MUCH more useable, since I don't have to depend on (generally) overloaded ISP DNS servers.

If you're sure it's not a latency issue, and it's not a local WiFi or platform issue, DNS is about all that's left. It could be a transparent proxy (as someone else suggested), but I'm not sure how widely those are actually deployed. I'd try a local DNS cache first and see if that helps.

My $0.02. :)

Diz

How about manually setting your DNS servers in your internet connection settings?

Had Comcast (the Cox of the midwest) for a while and had the same problem. Switched to using the DNS servers of another provider (just do a search for like ATT DNS or SBC DNS) and the problem went away.

Good luck.

Jason

Could it be advertising images linked in by the site in question? I've noticed some sites deliver their content fairly quickly, but the missing ads somehow prevent the page from showing at all until they are loaded, which can be more than 15 seconds (and past my patience).

My first instinct was to bite on the DNS issue. (Which is semi-related) The very first lookup of a given domain requires a recursive lookup starting at the ICANN designated Root Servers, following the chain all the way down to the particular server for the domain in question. Their DNS server (or any other in the chain) may be the cause of the delay.

Another issue I've found on my Windows laptop is that the Zero Configuration Wireless (quoting from memory) likes to "shop around" for a better connection from time to time, which does bad things to VPN tunnels etc, and invisibly resulting in some downtime at seemingly random intervals.

There could be a slow transparent proxy upstream of you, which might be hard to figure out.

And of course, it could be that your circuit upstream is oversubscribed, dropping packets, or has some other issue, which Ping should have found.

So, there are a few of the things I can think of off the top of my head. (Along with Spyware if it's a Windows PC)

--Mike--