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A quick question. I tested my domain using the following site http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/en/ping.php

It showed high packet loss in all countries. Packet loss of 70-100% Does this mean my site is loading slow or not loading at all to users in those countries?

Falcon Momot
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    A packet loss that high probably means people will not be able to access your site reliably. They might be able to load a page or two really slowly because of how TCP works, but browsers have timeouts. They will not keep trying indefinitely. – Zoredache Sep 13 '13 at 18:10

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Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: It Depends.

Zero is the only acceptable amount of packet loss.
Packet loss > 0 indicates a problem somewhere that needs to be investigated.

A little packet loss (<5%, occasionally) may make websites slow (from retransmission delays or lost DNS queries), but your average user probably won't notice.

Moderate packet loss (up to 10%, happening semi-regularly) will often be noticeable. The website will be "slow".

High packet loss (>10%, semi-regularly / constantly) will infuriate your users. The website will take a long time to load, or may not load at all. It will probably be so painfully slow that people stop visiting.

You are not experiencing "high" packet loss -- you're experiencing EXTREME packet loss (70+% of what your sending never gets where it's going -- If UPS worked that way you'd never ship anything with them again).
I would expect NOTHING to work with packet loss as extreme as what you're claiming -- you are effectively not connected to the internet.


My advice to you is to remedy the packet loss situation (i.e. "Find a new provider").
What you're describing is totally unacceptable.

voretaq7
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  • I contacted my hosting provider over 2 years ago regarding the issue and they said its not a problem I can see your site here!. I said thats because your sitting beside the server. Today I contacted my host regarding the issue again and received a solution in minutes. It was as follows. The only thing is I do not understand it - "it is your firewall config blocking the incoming ICMP packets (commonly used for single handshake DDOS)" Should I see an improvement in website traffic as a result of this being fixed? Packet loss is being returned as OKAY for all countries now – John OConnor Sep 13 '13 at 18:49
  • @JohnOConnor If your firewall was configured to block ICMP you would see 100% packet loss on ICMP traffic (like ping), even if everything else was working fine and your website was accessible. [Blocking ICMP traffic is a common misconfiguration](http://serverfault.com/questions/84963/why-not-block-icmp) which is generally "harmless" from an end user perspective ("the website still works"), but bad system management. – voretaq7 Sep 13 '13 at 19:23
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That your web server is lousy at responding to ping requests has no bearing whatsoever on its performance as a web server. Unless you specifically designed it to be good at responding to pings, there's no reason to expect it to do so well nor to care if it doesn't.

Update: It looks like there's no coordination between whoever or whatever is managing your server and whoever or whatever is measuring its performance. I would be extremely concerned that the firewall configuration is not well thought out and may be blocking things like path MTU discovery.

David Schwartz
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there are a few things you can do to find out if it is your webhosting provider or if it is a hop or two away from your server's endpoint. I recommend logging into your server where your site is hosted (providing you can actually log into it) and run an mtr to various domains (this also assumes you are running some flavor of linux, though I think there's an MTR for windows).

sample command would look like this: mtr somedomainhere.com

I would recommend various sites such as google, amazon, facebook, or some other well known server that most likely will respond to ICMP echo requests.

if you want to run only for a certain period of time, you can use the -c flag to set the packet count.

sample: mtr -c 500 somedomainhere.com

if you would like to let it run and look at it later, you can use the --report switch and save it to a text file.

sample: mtr -c 500 somedomainhere.com --report >> mtrReport.txt

If you don't have administrative permissions, you can ask the webhosting provider if they can run one for you and provide you with the report data. It's a good place to start when trying to troubleshoot connectivity.

using this tool will help pinpoint WHERE the packets are being dropped and who is to blame for the packet loss. If you determine that the packets are being dropped at your server, you can begin next steps.

if running mtr from your server to outside servers yields no packet loss, packets are most likely being filtered at your firewall. I would recommend running another mtr from your local machine to the server to see if and where there is packet loss...if it happens at the last hop or not at all, you know that the problem lies in your webserver and you can move on to next steps...if you get packet loss anywhere else, you can be fairly sure the problem is network related.

Next steps:
look at logs
look at firewall configuration
look at config files for your webserver

86bornprgmr
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