ISP IP issues/question

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Rick Bergeron - CPF

Rick Bergeron - CPF

SGF, Supreme Grumble Framer
Joined
Aug 18, 1999
Posts
2,280
Loc
Canistota, SD USA
Business
Lost Cajun Chateaux
Over the weekend, our ISP made system changes and our DHCP IP address changed.

Since then, all appears normal except access to one website in particular (there may be others that I have yet to find). Access times/page load has gone from a few seconds to 45 seconds PLUS. It makes for a slow, painful browsing experience.

http://zen-cart.com

Any suggestions on where to look. The only suggestion the ISP has provided is to make a couple of DNS changes in my router, while leaving Auto-DHCP turned on, which made no difference.

I'm beginning to think that our new IP is on some DNS IP blacklist but I don't have enough brainpower to carry on an intelligent conversation around that subject.

OLD IP - 216.255.212.18 MicroTik router (from my server logs)
NEW IP - 208.94.86.249 LinkSys WRT54GL router (from my server logs)

Any ideas?
Which tree should I be barking up?
 
If you are having DNS lookup problems, that would be an issue within the ISP's server network. If its brand new, it may take a few days to get all the updates.

You don't have to use their DNS server. You can use any of the free ones on the internet, if you'd rather try one to see if it makes a difference.

Mike
 
You might need to flush the DNS cache on your systems if you haven't rebooted them.

On windows: open a command prompt and type:
Code: 
ipconfig /flushdns

There are similar commands to do it on a Mac or linux.

If you think the DNS may be slow, you can check with Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark. I doubt it though, since it's only one site. If it were slow DNS, then you would expect the first time you go to a website in a while to be slow, and then fast after that (since it gets cached).

Also, since the site loads but is slow, you shouldn't be on a blacklist. Blacklisting is usually all or nothing.

Have you restarted your system since the change?
 
  • Flushed the DNS cache.
  • Restarted computer. Power down router and radio, wait 60 seconds and power up.
  • DNS Benchmark results OK.
  • Cleared cookies, cache, temp files, etc in both FF and IE8.
Ping, tracert & anything else that I know to test yields results in the milli-seconds.


  • Receiving page data, navigation between any pages on the zen-cart.com site takes 45-60 seconds to update.
  • Similar results on any computer at the house.
  • Normal results on any computer at the store (Verizon/Frontier DSL).
Other ideas?
 
Since the DNS benchmark came out ok I wouldn't expect any difference, but to make sure I would try a different DNS server just to make sure.
 
You might want to try rebooting your router. I've seen performance issues with them before.

It would also be a good idea to try a different browser. There might be some kind of cache, plugin, configuration, or toolbar that is interfering with that site or some content it loads.
 
Rick Bergeron - CPF said:
  • Flushed the DNS cache.
  • Restarted computer. Power down router and radio, wait 60 seconds and power up.
  • DNS Benchmark results OK.
  • Cleared cookies, cache, temp files, etc in both FF and IE8.
Ping, tracert & anything else that I know to test yields results in the milli-seconds.
Click to expand...

The only change that I know of is the ISP changing the router and IP address combination.
 
You can try to find out what is slow through Firebug.

  1. Install firebug
  2. restart firefox
  3. go to the web page
  4. click the firebug icon in the statusbar to open the panel
  5. right-click on the icon (same one) and enable all panels
  6. go to the Net panel
  7. load a page on the website that is slow
That should let you see if any particular elements are stalling the page.
 
TNX for the ideas so far.

Couldn't get the image from firebug to save, so used httpwatch to save a similar file. Doesn't mean a lot to me, but I know that elsewhere site access is normal. Here is 40 seconds plus regardless of the computer. It will be tomorrow before I can take the laptop to a different ISP connection to positively test access with the same computer/different IP


IntermaxIPissue.jpg
 
Did you say that you are using a wireless radio to receive the internet?

Have you tried a simple PING test, from dos? To a DNS domain such as www.thegrumble.com and then to the IP equivalent such as 24.248.57.66 If so, were both of them lagging?

The latency is probably in your provider's network, configuration, or congestion. If the only recent change was at their end, that's where my money goes.

I would start with the ISP, and let them test it from their end. They can ping from the central office, to the equipment in your home. This will identify if there are any delays associated with the signal between points A and B.

Mike
 
Yes, it is fixed point wireless from the house to the mountaintop 9 miles away. Think something along the lines of a satelite dish except it's pointed at the mountain instead of the sky. Motorola Canopy radios. I'm not sure if mine is in the 2 Ghz or 5 Ghz band. Radio latency is usually pretty good.

Pings are similar for the DNS or IP address. The Grumble times out for both but I checked a couple of others.

I'm still betting on the ISP but the story that I'm getting now is that since the pings are similar; it must not be their issue. The issue beginning with a router change & IP change doesn't seem to matter.

912250710.png
 
Oh yea, our router is blocking pings.

here's another pair you can try:

www.google.com and 66.102.7.99
 
Rick Bergeron - CPF said:
TNX for the ideas so far.

Couldn't get the image from firebug to save, so used httpwatch to save a similar file. Doesn't mean a lot to me, but I know that elsewhere site access is normal. Here is 40 seconds plus regardless of the computer. It will be tomorrow before I can take the laptop to a different ISP connection to positively test access with the same computer/different IP


IntermaxIPissue.jpg
Click to expand...

What the graph shows is that your browser is spending a lot of time waiting for a response to the server.

The red bars are defined as:
Wait is the idle time spent waiting for a response message from the server. This value includes delays introduced due to network latency and the time required to process the request on the web server.
Click to expand...

The fact that you got 304 responses from the 5 requests after the first one and they still took 20 seconds each is rather suspicious. This means that the server isn't bogged down generating pages and the data transfer speed isn't the problem. The request is stuck waiting for a response for almost all of the load time. The graph also rules out DNS since it's not causing the delay.

The other odd thing is that it is evidently happening only with this one page. I might suggest looking for other sites that are similarly slow.

Otherwise, you might have to take it up with your ISP over why the traffic to this site is being delayed. It used to work fine and still works fine on your other ISP. Since it's like the request or response are being delayed, it almost seems like something they are doing or have done is messing it up.

One more interesing experiment would be to try an HTTPS connection. See if it's still slow when connecting to https://www.zen-cart.com/
 
Try CC Cleaner to clear out your cache. Could be part of the problem.

I'd also go to another machine and see how quickly the page loads from there.
 
http and httpS both are similar in reaction.
IE8 and FF both similar in reaction.

Taking notebook to town to use on a different ISP won't happen 'til Monday to prove a difference using the exact same machine.

Rick Bergeron - CPF said:
  • Flushed the DNS cache.
  • Restarted computer. Power down router and radio, wait 60 seconds and power up.
  • DNS Benchmark results OK.
  • Cleared cookies, cache, temp files, etc in both FF and IE8.
Ping, tracert & anything else that I know to test yields results in the milli-seconds.
  • Receiving page data, navigation between any pages on the zen-cart.com site takes 45-60 seconds to update.
  • Similar results on any computer at the house.
  • Normal results on any computer at the store (Verizon/Frontier DSL).
Other ideas?
Click to expand...
 
janetj1968 said:
Try CC Cleaner to clear out your cache. Could be part of the problem.

I'd also go to another machine and see how quickly the page loads from there.
Click to expand...

The image that Rick posted shows that it's slow because a few requests are waiting for the server. If you look, you can see that the cache hits only take about 430ms to load.

It's not a bad idea to get some more data though. It would be interesting to see if the results are consistent both across accesses and on different machines.

Since HTTPS produced the same result, it virtually rules out any kind of deep packet inspection or monkeying since the connection is secured.

It might be interesting to see the tracert logs just to make sure there's nothing you missed.
 
Dumb me is having trouble saving the tracert results. As soon as tracert completes, the window closes before I have time to do anything.

tracert website.com >filename.txt doesn't do anything and I call myself checking my syntax for errors. No results are outside of the millisecond range.

The ISP guru who made all the changes a week ago did it late Friday and left on vacation. Typical behavior for most programmers though.

If I complain too much, the ISP told me that the provisioning software would be turned on for my account instead of letting me have as much bandwidth as the system and my radio will allow. That would suck more than slowing down a few domains.
 
TNX Paul,

Like I said, "Dumb me" was running it directly from the Run window.

For some reason, they can't put me back on the original router which is still in service. http://216.255.212.18/ you can even look at the traffic by clicking the "Graphs" button.

FWIW
zentrace1.JPG
 
Last edited:
Test this morning w/laptop on Verizon/Frontier DSL in town. Less than 2 seconds. Speedtest 71ms latency, 2.86Mb down/.7Mb up

Same laptop on Home fixed point wireless ISP. Speedtest latency 29ms, 2.5Mb down/1.75Mb up. Greater than 45 seconds.

We'll see how the ISP tries to turn this around and blame it on me or my equipment.

TNX everyone for all the suggestions thus far. If nothing else, I've been able to add a few tools in the box for next time.
 
Finally !

The ISP tech guy who makes router changes called. Started with the story that nothing could be done, that the problem was just one of those things that happen within automatic routing schemes.

I convinced him to try a test and switch my radio to a different router. Timing went from 50+ seconds per page load to 3 seconds per page load. No other comment except "We'll just leave you on this router instead of the other".
 
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