What is wrong with my network?

[lozina]

I have a home LAN wired up to a Verizon FIOS connection which is supposed to be 15 Mbs down/ 5 Mbs up.

Everything is hard wired - no wireless.

There is the Verizon OTN box which connects to the Verizon proprietary router device which connects to a D-link router (I hate the Verizon one) which is then connected to all my PCs.

When I browse the web I find that it is unusually sluggish, especially noticeable on GMail. GMail takes a long time load and frequently times out. It's horrible.

Yet the kicker here is if I go to bandwidthplace.com to test my speeds, it reports everything as normal - it's blistering fast. Any file download is typically FAST. Downloading off bittorrent for instance, is FAST.

What gives?

Why is something like GMail such a problem? It's all my machines, not just one. If I take the same laptop to a public wifi the Gmail is quick and reliable. I even had to modify my GMail account settings to be simple HTML to help avoid the lag and time out issues.

How do I diagnose this problem?
I have no clue what could be causing it.
Only thing I can think of is to plug my laptop into the OTN directly, bypassing the routers, to see if that makes a difference.

 

[spidey07]

Do that and bypass any home networking gear. This sounds like a slow DNS server. You can use the program NSlookup and just type in websites to see if it takes more than a second to get an address back.

 

[lozina]

Do that and bypass any home networking gear. This sounds like a slow DNS server. You can use the program NSlookup and just type in websites to see if it takes more than a second to get an address back.

good idea - thank you!

I will compare the results of that nslookup before and after bypassing the routers

quick question though - I am not certain how it works but I thought dns addresses would cache locally ? If so, wouldnt that mean it would only be slow in getting the initial request but subsequent ones would be quick? I ask because GMail is equally slow all day all night no matter how often I access it.

 

[DnetMHZ]

good idea - thank you!

I will compare the results of that nslookup before and after bypassing the routers

quick question though - I am not certain how it works but I thought dns addresses would cache locally ? If so, wouldnt that mean it would only be slow in getting the initial request but subsequent ones would be quick? I ask because GMail is equally slow all day all night no matter how often I access it.

Edit: oops, I didn't read your whole question, I was answering in reference to the caching throwing off your test results.

you can do "ipconfig /flushdns" (minus the quotes) to flush the local cache between tries.