Network speeds degrade with time

I bought an Asrock AM1B-ITX motherboard. It is working great, except for the wired download speed. When the machine boots up, it is close to the maximum the ISP provides me, but within a few hours it degrages from 3 Mbyte/sec down to 150 kbyte/sec, sometimes even worse, around 20. Upload starts from 2 Mbyte/sec up and stays around 1 Mbyte/sec. Both uploads and downloads fluctuate, but downloads more widely. Neihter reaches the speeds they showed in the first minutes after startup.

It does not depend on the applications running, torrent, ftp and browser speeds are all terrible.

This happens on the LAN as well, so the ISP is not at fault here. Also all other devices work just fine.
I tried the machine on a different cable, on a different router socket, everything is the same. I have reinstalled the driver on Windows 7, tried 8.1 and Puppy Linux as well. After around half an hour, download speeds fell, and stays in the 50-250 kbyte/sec range.

Sometimes when the download speed is really bad, the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive. Not the complete machine is frozen, I can still see things happening on the screen, videos are playing without a problem, but I can not stop them for example.

My UEFI is the latest.
Is this a hardware issue? How can I diagnose the real problem?

András

Posted 2014-08-04T21:53:51.223

Reputation: 426

Does this same thing happen with all your other devices, or is this the only device on the network? – CodeMonkey – 2014-08-04T22:45:34.710

Have you tried an external network adapter? – harrymc – 2014-08-10T16:06:11.793

Did you try to download something hosted in Same LAN? E.g. Large file from a LAN web server. Then test the speed. – Kasun – 2014-08-10T17:46:32.330

You can try running a tool like wireshark - https://www.wireshark.org/ - to see what your network interface is doing while these problems occur and see what is happening to the packets you are sending/receiving

– Jake – 2014-08-10T20:03:38.587

If your keyboard/mouse starts becoming unresponsive in relation to the apparent throughput of your network connection, I'm led to believe there is a problem with drivers, system interrupts or the southbridge on your mobo. Have you checked dmesg on linux when speeds get slow? Is CPU usage relatively high when there is a network transfer occurring? Do you have simultaneous problems with other southbridge devices, such as USB, audio, PCI-e, IDE/SATA?
The fact it also occurs on any platform suggest it may also be the network firmware. – joe – 2014-08-12T15:50:29.460

1""This happens on the LAN as well, so the ISP is not at fault here. Also all other devices work just fine."" you should describe in better terms how is you PC connected to internet and also what are the "other" devices – Pat – 2014-08-14T13:09:38.250

Answers

If you have another computer and it is not having the same issues with internet speeds, it's your computer having the issue. If this is a Desktop, your cheapest option time/money wise, is to buy an Ethernet Card to slide into one of your PCI slots, see if you get the same results. You could replace the router if that doesn't work.

If you can be bothered with it, you could try to create a new profile and see if it happens on that, if it does, you can try to reformat the machine and start from scratch.

Failing all of that, you're down to your MOBO being the issue.

Andrew

Posted 2014-08-04T21:53:51.223

Reputation: 625

Sounds like a hardware issue to me, considering the lagging mouse/kb input. – Bigbio2002 – 2014-08-15T15:08:43.400

open task manager, click on the performance tab and then on wifi/ethernet. if your computer is using a lot of bandwidth that must be slowing your download/upload speed, in which case you should look for the process that is using most of the bandwidth in task manager

DividedByZero

Posted 2014-08-04T21:53:51.223

Reputation: 280

Based on your description, the only apparent variables are the motherboard (ethernet chip) or the OS of the computer.

First I would reinstall the OS after backing up your data. If a clean install fails:

I agree with the suggestion that you attempt to use either a pci lan or usb, for example to determine if the onboard lan has failed. If this does not work, I would flash the bios.

Good luck and let us know what the outcome is!

Thomas

Posted 2014-08-04T21:53:51.223

Reputation: 11