I've been trying to figure out why some(very few) of the people who visit my site have random slowdowns and error pages('page cannot be loaded'). The random slowdowns and error pages never happen for me and most of the people who visit my site. The site is load balanced(which explains the 'random') and for some reason, I was thinking that lowering the MTU might help(I don't remember where I got that idea from).
Then I wanted to see what the best MTU from my office to the website was. This is where things got strange. Using 'ping www.example.com -f -l xxxx':
MTU of 1500: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1490: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1480: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1470: Request timed out (hu?)
MTU of 1475: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1474: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1473: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1472: Request timed out (???)
MTU of 1400: Request timed out (???)
MTU of 1300: Request timed out (???)
MTU of 1200: Request timed out (???)
MTU of 1100: Request timed out (???)
MTU of 1000: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1024: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set (ok)
MTU of 1025: Request timed out (???)
So it seems that my website isn't responding if the MTU is less than 1473 or greater than 1024. Shouldn't it respond with 'packet needs to be fragmented but..' instead???
Is that an actual problem? or is that how it should be? Could there be some bad hardware or incorrectly setup software causing that?