Download/Site Speeds...

[RaceMan763]

Hi,

I've been having real issues with speeds on the site for a couple months now. I'm in Germany, 250MBit connection (ISP is Telekom), and noticed no issues with other sites, getting 25MB/s regularly aside from maybe weekend evenings.

Right now I'm downloading Fonteney at ~100KB/s while the pictures on the download page for the track are still loading in after 2 minutes. Straight back to ISDN days. Best I've gotten in recent months is 200-300KB/s.

Any ideas?

 

[Neilski]

Hi there.
Can you please try a traceroute and post the results? See this post for instructions & background info, including the suggestion that it's worth consulting your ISP to see if they know of any reason why there should be a problem.

 

[Neilski]

PS: I just checked the log and the download of that file took you around 71 minutes. That means the average download speed was around 125kB/s, suspiciously close to a nice round 1.0Mb/s. This might suggest that there's is rate limiting happening somewhere (your ISP?). We don't have any rate limiting on our side.

 

[Sascha Guenther]

Same issue here too. Also German Telekom. Currently it takes up to 1 hr to download Fonteny (a 500 MB file). Other sites are working. Only RD not. This occurs sometimes - some days are fine, some not.

 

[David Jessat]

Same here, weirdly also Telekom...

 

[Neilski]

Starts to sound even more like a (possibly intentional) rate limit is in place on the ISP side.

Can you all please raise a support ticket with them to ask them if this can be fixed? I don't think there's anything at all that we can do (we aren't their customers so I doubt they would even talk to us).

 

[Scarystuff]

I am having the same problem, but it comes and goes. Some times I get full speed, but other times, mostly in evenings EU time, downloads slow to a crawl. Downloading a file right now at the incredible speed of 50 KB/s. I did traceroutes several times and it always have a hickup at the second last node. When I try to ping /t www.racedepartment.com while the speeds are slow, I have massive packet loss.

Ping statistics for 31.204.153.0:
Packets: Sent = 547, Received = 469, Lost = 78 (14% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 37ms, Maximum = 40ms, Average = 37ms

This is the only site that crawls to a halt like that. When it happens, pictures on the site also loads incredibly slow, like being back in middle of the nineties with a 28.8 baud modem.

Just did another traceroute

Tracing route to racedepartment.com [31.204.153.0]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms xe-2-1-0-1103.rgnqe10.dk.ip.tdc.net [87.58.128.130]
3 20 ms 20 ms 20 ms ae3-0.khk7nqp7.dk.ip.tdc.net [83.88.2.35]
4 38 ms 38 ms * i3d-2.smartdc.nl-ix.net [193.239.117.77]
5 37 ms 38 ms 38 ms 109.200.218.247
6 37 ms 38 ms * firestone.racedepartment.com [31.204.153.0]
7 38 ms 38 ms 38 ms firestone.racedepartment.com [31.204.153.0]

Trace complete.

It seems there is also a problem in NL now.

I think it started to happen around the same time as the site update. Did you change host for the site?

 

[Scarystuff]

As you can see, it is not my connection: https://www.speedtest.net/result/8985170090

 

[Neilski]

As you can see, it is not my connection: https://www.speedtest.net/result/8985170090

Honestly, life isn't that simple. You can have a really fast connection to some servers and lousy links to others, because the ISP has different connectivity arrangements for different networks around the world.
I just did a test download and it's working fine for me.
We haven't changed host or made any other changes for that matter.

I think you should consider giving our site's URL to your ISP and asking them if they can explain the intermittent slowness. They will know their peering arrangements with other networks and should be able to give you a good answer. (Do by all means report back what they say.)

If the problem was truly at our provider's end then it would be likely to be affecting lots of people (and we'd be hearing about it). However, our outgoing network bandwidth has been pretty normal (high!) for the last several hours so no indications of trouble there.

 

[Sascha Guenther]

Your site speed drives me crazy, I nearly can´t download any file in an appropriate speed (I have a 16k connection):

Whats going on with RD?

 

[Neilski]

Your site speed drives me crazy, I nearly can´t download any file in an appropriate speed (I have a 16k connection):
View attachment 357965

Whats going on with RD?

I've just carried out speed tests between various sites on speedtest.net and our web server. Some of the sites I chose are hosted by your ISP and are not too far away from your apparent location. I didn't detect any issues, so I think you're going to have to ask your ISP to investigate.

 

[Sascha Guenther]

Asking our ISP (German Telekom) makes no sense at all. I wonder why this is only for your site. All other are fine without any issues. But thanks anyway.

 

[Neilski]

Asking our ISP (German Telekom) makes no sense at all. I wonder why this is only for your site. All other are fine without any issues. But thanks anyway.

Well I'd say it makes a lot of sense, personally. They may have some kind of traffic management in place. But that speed is so ridiculously low that it makes no sense. Is it consistently bad?

 

[Sascha Guenther]

Yes it is. It was fine until some days ago but now it is so slow again. I thought you have reduced some bandwith or it is due to the fact that more people are at home right now and using your service. See my post from Dec 22nd (#4). I have had the same issues already last year.

 

[Neilski]

Yes it is. It was fine until some days ago but now it is so slow again. I thought you have reduced some bandwith or it is due to the fact that more people are at home right now and using your service. See my post from Dec 22nd (#4). I have had the same issues already last year.

Ah OK. I suspect you didn't contact Deutsche Telekom as I recommended in post #6?
We don't have any bandwidth limitation in place, or at least nothing that anyone has told me about
There's really nothing more that we can do.

Like I said in post #9 above, connectivity is not always straightforward. Hosts A and B can have high speed to host C but yet the speed between A and B can be awful.
Internet routing can hit trouble in very localised ways.
Just last week I experienced exactly this problem with connections from my home to my work computers. Most of the people in my country were unaffected and my own broadband was perfect to every other network I tried. After about 4 days, when the speed to my work network (hosted on a massive network serving well over 10 million people) finally dropped to a completely unusable 1 Mb/s, they found the problem, replaced some hardware and bingo, speed issue cured.

 

[Scarystuff]

It's funny how you think we should all contact our ISP's when it's only your site that is the problem. I doubt all ISP's have suddenly decided to throttle the bandwidth to this one site starting about the same time as you decided to update everything...

 

[Neilski]

It's funny how you think we should all contact our ISP's when it's only your site that is the problem. I doubt all ISP's have suddenly decided to throttle the bandwidth to this one site starting about the same time as you decided to update everything...

smh
I don't know what to say to you. Would you prefer to believe that I'm lying to you and that we have decided to throttle the bandwidth to a few users on Deutsche Telekom IP addresses, just for kicks? It most certainly isn't all ISPs as I've just checked download speed myself and I got full wire speed on my fibre broadband for an AC track.

We have many many thousand users downloading stuff all day every day.
A tiny number of users report speed problems in an average month. This is of course likely to be a small fraction of the number experiencing speed problems but even still it's fair for us to assume that the problems are infrequent and probably localised.
It may be an issue with our ISP, or it may be with your ISP, or it may even be somewhere in between. We are a small team of volunteers, so I reckon it's not unreasonable for us to ask you to get your ISPs to investigate in the first instance.