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I have just travelled to the US from Europe, and before that none of the problems described below happened in my networks.
When I browse facebook, gmail, stack exchange etc. the network is working fine, webpages load quickly etc. However, if I even try to load a youtube video, the whole network just stops. Pings jump from 20ms to 4000ms and more for every computer in the network, not only mine. However, if my flatmate enters same webpages from his machine - no problems occurr.
I am using Windows 10 Prev, my colleague is running Ubuntu. Wireless connection. I tried renstalling drivers, changing IP configurations, running troubleshooters etc. but to no avail. Any streaming (youtube, fox online etc.) will cause the whole network to fail. Also some other webpages (windowscentral, weather.com) sometimes cause problems. When I see the webpage is loading instead of jumping up immediately, I check the ping and it is always already up to few thousands miliseconds.
PC Wireless Card: Qualcomm Atheros AR956x Driver version: 10.0.0.321 (dated 16th June 2015)
Router/AP: Cisco Model: DPC3941t DOCSIS 3.0 DS/US: 24x4
I would be grateful for any advice about what may cause such strange (imho) trouble.
EDIT: What I also noticed is once one of the trouble-causing pages are loaded (for ex. YouTube page is no longer loading, just the video is buffering) the pings are back to normal and everything appear to work fine. What is more: facebook worked flawlessly yesterday, but today, during its first loading, it aslo caused pings to jump up to 800-1000ms. Some of the ping packets were dropped (waiting too long.) After the page loaded - again, no problems at all.
3yakuya
Posted 2015-07-14T01:43:11.753
Reputation: 161
2High latency without packet loss when moving a lot of data is the basic description of "buffer bloat". I wonder if you can get around the problem by enabling ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) in Windows:
netsh interface tcp set global ecncapability=enabled. Also look into using a router you can install CeroWrt on. – Spiff – 2015-07-14T02:45:19.3601Oh, also, if your wireless client is using 802.11 Power Save mode, and your router/AP handles it poorly, it can exacerbate buffering problems. Go into the advanced driver properties for your wireless card drivers and see if disabling 802.11 Power Save makes a difference. – Spiff – 2015-07-14T02:48:34.737
Thanks for your interest. I switched Power Save mode off, and enabled ECN - pings appear to jump to a bit lower values (about 800ms) but still they do and vids do not load fluently. Advanced settings of my card are now: 802.11b Premable: Long andShort, AdHoc 11n: disable, Receive Buffers: 512, Scan Valid Interval: 60, Transmit Buffers: 512. Can't dig too much into the router thing - it is provided by the flat management. Anything else I should look into? Like I mentioned, only my PC with Windows 10 is causing this stuff (same pages from Ubuntu - no problems) – 3yakuya – 2015-07-14T12:32:49.877
I also edited the question as I have just noticed that once youTube page is loaded (no longer moving circle shown instead of page icon) and the video is still buffering - the pings appear to be normal again (20-30 ms). Another web page causing problems - weather.com . It appears that any webpage that my browser need to load somehow longer will cause the whole network to go mad with pings. – 3yakuya – 2015-07-14T12:40:17.673
is there a pattern in regards to protocol? gmail/ face/ stack are https. Are the problematic ones https as well or are they http? – mnmnc – 2015-07-14T13:05:55.370
You wrote "However, if my flatmate enters same webpages from his machine - no problems occurr." Does his Ubuntu system also see high ping times when you are accessing YouTube, though? I.e., he sees nominal performance only when he accesses YouTube when you are not trying to access YouTube videos at the same time? Have you also used the tracert command (Windows systems have "tracert" rather than "traceroute"). Does that show the high response times starting at the first network hop, i.e., your wireless router? Are you both using wireless?
– moonpoint – 2015-07-14T13:08:51.833About http(s): I believe it is not the source, because some of the problematic web pages use http (fox) and others https (facebook). About other machine: if I enter some long-loading page the whole network goes mad (my computer and my flatmates Ubuntu machine see pings going up to 4000ms even). If the same web page is entered from my flatmate's Ubuntu - no problems both for him or me. We are both using the same Wireless network. With tracert - everything appears to be fine (no hops appear to be responsing too much longer than others.) – 3yakuya – 2015-07-14T13:26:24.353
@3yakuya Could you list the make/model/hardware-revision/firmware-version of your modem/gateway/AP? In case it's a buffer bloat problem, I want it documented (for others' sake, and research's sake) that that equipment has the problem. Also, do you have the ability to try a different model modem/gateway/AP, even temporarily? – Spiff – 2015-07-14T17:31:20.247
I provided the information that I could. I am not able to try different hardware. I can only add that the same PC run perfectly fine in another network, just 20 hours earlier, and was not used in the meantime. I use it for not too long, since like a month, but it never caused trouble, and it was constantly in a network with a few other machines with Windows, Ubuntu and OSX. – 3yakuya – 2015-07-15T01:10:17.813
Doesn't the information I provided help even a bit? Is there something I should be aware when using this router/AP? I am quite hopeless with it, and it trully makes my life much more difficult. I noticed that after typing "ipconfig" I see both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses marked with "Preferred", and I am not really able to understand what it means. Could this have something to do with the issue? – 3yakuya – 2015-07-16T00:17:00.227
Fighting the faulty networking I messed the system too much. Decided to refresh it to starting state (erase all data). Did not work (network still caused problems). Then I reinstalled whole system into a fresh copy of Windows 8.1 - problem still persists. It is hopeless, I need this machine to work so bad. – 3yakuya – 2015-07-17T01:20:40.287