Is my neighborhood slow, or am I killing my router?

[Bubbleawsome]

Hello all, once again I come to you with a generic problem I need fixed!
I am a huge bandwidth hog, my downloads frequently look like this.

Along with 2 or 3 downloads from my ipad and imac and streaming music.
I didn't catch 1 or 2 downloads stopping for a while, then restarting.

Is this due to my overheating my router, maxing my router's speed, or just my neighborhood having other bandwidth hogs in it, or something different? My router is an older airport extreme, and it feels a bit warm, but not hot. I have charter cable's 30/3 plan getting more like 45/4 when this isn't going on. I had another thread about my iPad being slow, but now it's everything.

With one download I get 45/4/ping 23
With that going on;

Crazy.
Help?

 

[VirtualLarry]

sounds to me like you might be choking your upload bandwidth, and might need a router with good QoS.

Either that, or get FIOS instead of cable, so you at least have usable upload bandwidth.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Noticed you're on the wireless, same issue if you're wired to teh router?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

Noticed you're on the wireless, same issue if you're wired to teh router?

Yep, mildly better ping. ~350

sounds to me like you might be choking your upload bandwidth, and might need a router with good QoS.

Either that, or get FIOS instead of cable, so you at least have usable upload bandwidth.

I don't use upload that much, unless DL requires UL? I'm not a networking guy, hardware is my thing. D:

What's QoS?

Fios doesn't come to my house, fastest plan is 100/4. No idea on bandwidth. It sucks because 0.5 miles away from me gets the crazy bandwidth 300/100 quantum FTTH thing, but I don't. Stuck with this.

 

[John Connor]

Question: Is Ultimateterrain V3 for Flight Simulator?

Edit- Looks like its for a game called BeamNG.

 

[ch33zw1z]

You could try a new router. Testing during peak times and comparing to off times will at least give you an idea of what to expect.

IMXP, ISP's won't care about speed issues until you are receiving less than 50% of what you're paying for.

You're on charter, so if you complain they'll probably replaced your modem to start. IMXP with charter, don't expect a top notch tech who can answer technical questions.

 

[Bubbleawsome]

You could try a new router. Testing during peak times and comparing to off times will at least give you an idea of what to expect.

IMXP, ISP's won't care about speed issues until you are receiving less than 50% of what you're paying for.

You're on charter, so if you complain they'll probably replaced your modem to start. IMXP with charter, don't expect a top notch tech who can answer technical questions.

Yeah, charter is eh. I'll test everything else later. At school right now.

Question: Is Ultimateterrain V3 for Flight Simulator?

Edit- Looks like its for a game called BeamNG.

Yep, called beamng.drive. It's pretty cool.

 

[Cabletek]

http://www.myaccount.charter.com/customers/support.aspx?supportarticleid=2615

 

[ch33zw1z]

OP, If you didn't want to buy a router right away, you can always hard wire direct to the modem and see if the symptom changes.

 

[Bubbleawsome]

OP, If you didn't want to buy a router right away, you can always hard wire direct to the modem and see if the symptom changes.

Yeah, I don't really have any money right now. I will try that with my iMac, but the modem is far away from my pc.

 

[ch33zw1z]

How far? Any walls in between?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

Far, and lots of walls, but the iMac has the same thing, as does my iPad and iPhone. (Dang that's a ton of apple.) The iMac was plugged directly into the router and had the same issues.

 

[ch33zw1z]

If you determine it's your router, I've got a spare Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N (refurbished). I'm not going to use it. just pay shipping. It has Buffalo's DDWRT version on it, came from them with it. It works good at a router or an WAP. I wanted it for a client bridge, didn't work out in that mode.

 

[SecurityTheatre]

Poor wifi signal could cause these issues. But if you have put it on a wire (AND disabled the wifi) and it is still slow, then it could be the router or the ISP.

You need to eliminate one or the other.

Did you try rebooting the router and modem?

I'm pretty sure it's not overheating. That's a very rare thing for a simple router to do and it would probably smell a bit burnt if that were the case. Those chips are usually rated to 90C or higher...

 

[Bubbleawsome]

If you determine it's your router, I've got a spare Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N (refurbished). I'm not going to use it. just pay shipping. It has Buffalo's DDWRT version on it, came from them with it. It works good at a router or an WAP. I wanted it for a client bridge, didn't work out in that mode.

That looks really great, but if I do determine that it is the router (haven't tested yet.) my mom will want me to replace it with another Apple one. :/ the only reason there is a pc in the house is for my games, everything else is "Apple easy"

Poor wifi signal could cause these issues. But if you have put it on a wire (AND disabled the wifi) and it is still slow, then it could be the router or the ISP.

You need to eliminate one or the other.

Did you try rebooting the router and modem?

I'm pretty sure it's not overheating. That's a very rare thing for a simple router to do and it would probably smell a bit burnt if that were the case. Those chips are usually rated to 90C or higher...

I have rebooted, nothing else. I'll get to that.

 

[Bubbleawsome]

Ok, tested it all, only iMac was close enough though.
Router-wireless- ping 23 31/3
Router-wired- ping 23 31/4
Just modem- failed, no DNS or ip. (Wut)

Interesting tidbit though, when I started the download part it would spike to 113 then fall to 31. Before all this started the iMac was wired (not anymore) and would always hit 30.25, no more no less, while my wireless pc would hit 45+. Now it seems like it is ping issues. I will load chunks of a file at a time.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Just modem: You will have to fully power cycle the modem to get it to recognize a PC directly attached.

- Unplug modem's power, ethernet, and coax. wait a couple minutes
- power off PC
- Plug in modem's coax and power, wait for it to initialize.
- plug in ethernet into modem and PC, boot the PC.

 

[SecurityTheatre]

Ok, tested it all, only iMac was close enough though.
Router-wireless- ping 23 31/3
Router-wired- ping 23 31/4
Just modem- failed, no DNS or ip. (Wut)

Interesting tidbit though, when I started the download part it would spike to 113 then fall to 31.

Spiking up high and then falling down is unusual behaviour as it indicates that TCP windows sizes were able to grow rapidly (due to available bandwidth) and then were later diminished by lost or dropped packets).

I am guessing two things.

1) You may be dropping packets somewhere due to errors... this could be line noise with your ISP, or your router choking on something.

2) Bandwidth saturation by something else. You can drop packets when your bandwidth is saturated. Especially if your upload bandwidth is saturated (Torrent clients will do this, if not limited), you can see this issue.

Good luck.

 

[Bubbleawsome]

Just modem: You will have to fully power cycle the modem to get it to recognize a PC directly attached.

- Unplug modem's power, ethernet, and coax. wait a couple minutes
- power off PC
- Plug in modem's coax and power, wait for it to initialize.
- plug in ethernet into modem and PC, boot the PC.

Coax?

 

[ch33zw1z]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable

oh, and if you have a modem that does VOIP, you will need to remove the battery as well during the power cycle.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Spiking up high and then falling down is unusual behaviour as it indicates that TCP windows sizes were able to grow rapidly (due to available bandwidth) and then were later diminished by lost or dropped packets).

Interesting. I get that behavior at speedtest.net on my FIOS connection. Would that also be an indication of rate-limiting?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

Tested and nothing changed except the ping went to 30. But what is this about packet dropping? I have 0% packet loss on pingtest. I'm just quoting figures, no idea what I'm doing.

 

[SecurityTheatre]

Tested and nothing changed except the ping went to 30. But what is this about packet dropping? I have 0% packet loss on pingtest. I'm just quoting figures, no idea what I'm doing.

Well that's good to know. But performance on a link is still ultimately arbitrated by packet loss.

TCP windows sizes grow (with a subsequent increase in speed) until ACK packets cease to return within the window timeout. Those packets are either dropped in transit, or simply arrive too late (past the timeout).

Regardless, consuming all the bandwidth results in "lost" packets (delayed packets are the same as lost packets to a network stack).

Then the TCP sindow size is decreased according to some metric and transmission continues. The TCP windows then grows again (usually at a slower rate) until another drop is seen, and it is scaled back slightly less and grows again slightly slower.

The actual implementation of this window sizing algorithm varies slightly by OS and network stack, but it's mostly consistent across platforms.

In this sense, it's pretty unusual to see the speed climb rapidly and then later slow down unless you're running into packet shaping and/or data loss issues that aren't inherent to the speed of the link.

 

[Bubbleawsome]

It spikes to anywhere from 80 to 130+ then falls to 30 and climbes to around 35 by the end of the run. This makes it even more odd because my downloads are about 0.25. No idea.