Questions[internet](server)

My customer complains about low internet speeds. When measured with Speedtest.net speeds are acceptable. Periodic measured downloads are 10% to 30% of the nominal speed. I cannot explain that.

Some background. The problematic connection is on one of those sunny Caribbean islands where fast internet is not the greatest asset. Lately internet speeds became decent, up to 200 Mbps. But ping round trip to (say) Amsterdam is about 180 ms.

The customer has a 100 Mbps fiber connection. When carrying out a speedtest on a Windows machine (speedtest.net) to the ISP CO we obtain 95 Mbps. When using the same speed test to Amsterdam we reach 60-70 Mbs. Fully acceptable.

Some time ago I installed a RasPi which periodically wgets a file from one of my servers in Amsterdam. In a datacenter, which is directly connected to AMS-IX. Using this command:

wget -O /dev/null --report-speed=bits http://aserv.example.net/~myuser/links/M77232917.txt

The .txt file is 23MByte of numbers. (Actually it is the one but largest Mersenne Prime, 23e6 digits)

When I download that file on the problematic network, wget reports this:

dev/null 100%[====================================================================>]  22.81M  11.6Mb/s   in 17s    

2019-02-08 14:27:55 (11.2 Mb/s) - ‘/dev/null’ saved [23923322/23923322]

That is at the same time speedtest.net reports 60-70 Mbps.

I know that the Raspi has its limitations. But this speed varies wildly. One time the RasPi report this 11 Mbps, the next time 22 Mbps. But sometimes as low as 1.5 Mbps.

When I do this test with a really powerful laptop, top speeds are somewhat higher (up to 30 Mbps), but also show the same lows. So it indicates a RasPi limitation on the high side, but not the 10 Mbps on the low side.

I issued exactly the same command from a server in München, Germany in a datacenter. Speed 96 Mbps.

Then from a consumer 100 Mbps fiber connection in the Netherlands: 65 Mbps.

Then, at my home which has nominal 10 Mbps ADSL. Speedtest shows 10Mbps. Wget gives 8.5 Mbps. Which is equal in my book.

This precludes any limitation on the server which acts as host for the file download.

I do not expect that anyone can point out the cause of the slowness of the connection at the customer premises. But can anyone explain the discrepancy between the speedtest.net and the wget?

Is there something the speedtest ignores, or does it measure only the peaks? Or is wget seriously influenced by long ping times?

I feel that the wget test gives the real, effective speed, while speedtest is mainly to show the advertised speed.

It sounds obvious that a faster connection lowers latency... But I wonder: I am working remotely on a host the other side of the world - light can only travel so fast (1 foot in a nano second) and we both have broadband connections in excess of 1,000kbps upload and 10,000kbps download:

Will a higher bandwidth connection lower the time it takes to ping?? Since it is very little data how would a faster connection help? Currently ping takes 450ms is there any way I can improve it??

Every few weeks I get an email (usually a very unpleasant one) or sometimes even a phone call from a Facebook user who believes that I am "hacking" their internet. They come to this conclusion after they end up on my site after entering www.facebook.com. Looking at my server logs, it seems like this happens to about 1 person per day from different IPs and service providers.

The HOST: header in their request does contain www.facebook.com as I can confirm from my server logs. At this point I believe the problem must lie in DNS. Somehow my IP ends up getting served for a www.facebook.com query. This must happen very infrequently otherwise I'd be seeing a lot more traffic from the problem. In fact, my site would be flattened if even a small fraction of Facebook users ended up there.

Any thoughts on the root cause of this? Anyone seen anything similar? At this point the only course of action I can think of is to create a special landing page for users requesting www.facebook.com from my server telling them to try again later.

At the moment we're trying to decide whether to move our datacenter from the west coast to the east coast.

However, I am seeing some disturbing latency numbers from my west coast location to the east coast. Here's a sample result, retrieving a small .png logo file in Google Chrome and using the dev tools to see how long the request takes:

• West coast to east coast:
  215 ms latency, 46 ms transfer time, 261 ms total
• West coast to west coast:
  114 ms latency, 41 ms transfer time, 155 ms total

It makes sense that Corvallis, OR is geographically closer to my location in Berkeley, CA so I expect the connection to be a bit faster.. but I'm seeing an increase in latency of +100ms when I perform the same test to the NYC server. That seems .. excessive to me. Particularly since the time spent transferring the actual data only increased 10%, yet the latency increased 100%!

That feels... wrong... to me.

I found a few links here that were helpful (through Google no less!) ...

• Does routing distance affect performance significantly?
• How does geography affect network latency?
• Latency in Internet connections from Europe to USA

... but nothing authoritative.

So, is this normal? It doesn't feel normal. What is the "typical" latency I should expect when moving network packets from the east coast <--> west coast of the USA?

I originally titled this "how to tell if your internet is down or your network is just screwed up" and Jeff's AI said that this questioned would probably be closed.

Nevertheless, someone here is always on the phone with the ISP and it's usually our fault. What are some of the best techniques for telling whether you've got an issue or they've got an issue.

I know this might be too much of a blanket question, but in a case where there's intermittent latency and disconnects (not just overall outages [i.e. can't ping google.com]) what do you do before calling the ISP?