Help With Constant Connection Drops & Continuously Variable Speeds

[esox]

So is this normal ? To have the download speed chart looking like a cardiograph reading.



146632

Using Grabit with Usenetserver and Astraweb with 2 different ISP's. Just switched to another ISP with a 250/20 hybrid fiber connection and it's always the same thing regardless of what the Usenet service provider is.

[piercerseth]

Of course not. It should be flat like a dead guy's ekg. Are you able to run the local machine directly wired off the modem without a router or any other appliance in the way? Test again with a different newsreader.

[esox]

Thanks for the reply piercerseth. Connecting directly to the modem didn't help. I also tried Binreader, but same problems persisted. Maybe I'll try another usenet provider to see if that helps.

[witchking42]

Is it just usenet access that is giving you these results?

Try a huge test file download from

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/download.html

See if you get similar results.

WK

[esox]

Hi-

It only happens with newsgroups. When I torrent or download large update files like GPU drivers, it's a constant download rate.

[witchking42]

Have you tried changing the port for the newsgroup provider?

A lot of ISP's will traffic manage ports 119 and 563, however most of the major usenet providers will accept connections on port 80/443 to get around this exact problem. Have you checked what ports they can accept connections on and try any alternates?

I'd try for port 443 first as this is SSL encrpypted and may help obfuscate the traffic from any downstream management/policy devices.


Wk

[esox]

Thanks for the suggestion,

I'll try it tonight when I get home.

[Beck38]

Which Astraweb? (with multiple server plants folks really need to be a bit more specific)

But this is what I get all the time with Astra/US. Sometimes pausing the download for a couple minutes, then starting it back up again and getting new 'front end' ports cures the problem, which is that the 'front end' processor you are attached to (with x connections) is going south, and doing the 'usenet two-step' of jogging the plant to put you on another processor (your reader should tell you somewhere in it's setup when it's getting new connections), and then things will/should start running fine.

This seems to be something specific to Astra/US, although I'll bet that they are running the same s/w at Astra/EU.

Of course, if this is happening overnight and you sawing zzzz's, it may stay that way for an hour or two, then start working fine again 'on it's own'. Astra/US does appear to 'reset' it's front end ports every 3-4 hours or so, you may catch it doing it if you have a large transfer going on (takes time) and watch it closely.

[esox]

It was both Astra us & eu and Usenetserver`s 20 connection hispeed plan.

Playing with ports and SSL didn't help. Please keep in mind that this issue existed on 2 different ISP's using completely different technologies. One was line of sight wireless and the other was hybrid fiber. Both using different PC's.

Discovered something interesting. Connecting via VPN eliminated connection drops and speed variations. But it increased download time by a factor of 3.

[Beck38]

From your description (multiple ISP's and changing settings all around) that you may have a tier 1 provider out there messing up/around. Do you have the tracert of each of those going to Astra (US/EU) and UNS?

And then the VPN, if your speed drops by that much, I'd be looking for another VPN provider, although at 250Mb/s (I'll assume that as you didn't specify but again, I'll assume it wasn't 250Kb/s!) It's going to have to be a top flight provider. Perhaps by cutting the speed by 1/3rd 'masks' the problem so either you can't see it or it is simply too small.

When I first got into the VPN world, I talked to a number of folks on high end fiber in the US (FIOS at the time, Google fiber didn't exist 5+ years ago)) and who used top line VPN routers (actually multicore Atom Linux boxes) in the $1K range; only a handful of providers could keep up with the speed (100Mb/s). The manufacturer of that box stopped production due to the limited market; I bet if they started it up now with all the gigaspeed plants being built they'd do better. But then it'd be back to the providers, of course.

Maybe at that speed the usenet plants simply can't keep up, and dropping it to 1/3rd that (say 80Mb/s) and they can. You may simply be way too far out on that cutting edge (I'd also expect the number of ports may be involved, as with Astra it's 20 max), have you tried a trial account with Giganews and 50 connections?

Just a thought, but I think you're about 5 years (or more) ahead of the game with that speed.