IP Networking

Wow, bright colors.

Hi,

I lease a dedicated server and it's usually fine. However, lately it seems slow. The hosting company says all is well, my isp says all is well (and it appears so using this), and yet the fastest file transfer I can get is 40kbs or thereabouts.

I ran a trace from the server to my own ip and the results seem to match this

http://network-tools.com/default.asp...=207.36.86.166
Starts bogging down near qwest.net

This one, however, is more in line with my windows trace, kinda uninformative (at the time I'm typing this there were no results).

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/tracer...=207.36.86.166
[4 hops with no response; assuming we hit a firewall that blocks pings]

The host tech support is only two hops from the server so naturally there isn't much to get in the way.

So, the question is, what can we infer from these results and is there anything I can do about any of it? I do 3 and 4 gig file transfers and I need all the speed I can get.

Thanks for your insights.

What speeds should you be able to get?

Also, does this speed vary depending on the time of day? Have you ever been able to transfer at faster then 40kbs?

Hi woofie, thanks for your reply.

Normally I pull in 300 to 350 kbs, and I can do a 4 gb file in a couple hours (that's download - a pox on the inventor of ADSL).

As for variance, the load is spread surprisingly evenly around the clock, with maybe a slight increase in traffic from after school hours into prime time evening US EST (that is, now).

What I've been doing is creating backups in ISO format, then download the single ISO files as opposed to trying to sift and sort through twenty thousand files to see which have been updated and which haven't. The last successful run of the backup was just early last week, but since that time things have really slowed - I noticed it in particular over the weekend because I had occassion to redo one of the backups but couldn't download it. I waited a couple days to see if the problem would clear and when it didn't, I called the hosting company and my isp.

It's interesting, though, that this afternoon when I tested again, the file transfer begins slow but then builds up to about 250kbs. And while I can appreciate the change, there is definitely something wrong compared to just two weeks ago. Normally, I'd start a transfer, and boom it was 300+ kbs, and I'd let it work overnight.

The only other thing of note is that the overall server traffic has increased 10x over the past couple months. Back in January and February the extra traffic didn't seem to affect anything. But I thought, what the hey, and I took the popular items offline in order to see if there'd be improved performance. There wasn't. And tho I use the large files as examples, you can notice the sluggishness when just visiting sites hosted on the server.

netstat and the logs don't show any unusual activity.

If I can speculate, I'd guess there's been routing changes. And if that's the case, I don't know if there's anything I can do about it except change hosts.