Since Friday evening I've noticed HTTP is excruciatingly slow on Telecom ADSL - HTTPS and all other traffic is normal speed.

Pings, traceroutes etc look fine.

As I write this post, the page finally finished loading after about 3 minutes.

Everything seems to be happening in little bursts, as if there is major packet loss, but MTR's don't show this.

All other types of traffic seem to be fine, and if I run a speed test I get 14.5Mbit down and 700kbit up.

HTTPS is fast, e.g. my Facebook account is set to HTTPS and pages load fine, but loading say a news article on stuff.co.nz the text of the page loads in about 10 seconds, but the images etc load up over the next 2-3 minutes.

I can't see anything obviously wrong like MTU/MSS issues, and my traffic is not going via the cache as I am excluded from that (and have tested on the Lagado tester to ensure this is the case).

Does any technical people have any ideas or suggestions? I think explaining this to the helpdesk will be difficult.

It's not a single computer problem, have tested on several. If I enable the debugging plugins in Safari I can see the data is loading in bursts about 100ms apart.

Router is a Cisco 877.

Edit: I do seem to have minor packet loss:


Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. gw01.local 0.0% 429 3.1 2.3 1.3 44.2 4.0
2. 125-237-88-1.jetstream.xtra.co.nz 1.2% 429 11.9 15.4 10.8 112.1 12.0
3. mdr-fid-dom.akcr10.global-gateway.net 1.4% 428 2720. 1821. 1366. 2876. 221.1
4. ae4-20.akcr10.global-gateway.net.nz 0.7% 428 9.9 11.9 9.2 76.0 8.0
5. g0-1-0.tkcr3.global-gateway.net.nz 0.2% 428 10.4 12.7 9.5 120.6 10.6
6. 202.50.234.78 0.5% 428 25.2 24.6 21.0 122.8 9.9
7. v11-2.fcore-mlx1.wlg.trademe.co.nz 0.0% 428 21.9 24.6 21.1 107.8 10.8
8. stuff.co.nz 0.2% 428 23.0 22.9 20.3 83.8 7.7