High Latency - this may be the cause

Forums › Vodafone New Zealand › High Latency - this may be the cause

possom

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Topic # 201285 11-Aug-2016 21:09

This may be a issue for any ISP...

I was getting real high latency, which was only apparent when playing games. It turns out that Dropbox camera/file upload can kill your internet connection, and I was seeing pings to my ISP gateway jumping from 15ms to 1500ms.

I noticed that this is due to Dropbox upload, which can be throttled on PC/Mac, but there is no such option for mobile apps.

Just so you know!

Full thread here: http://community.vodafone.co.nz/t5/Broadband-services/Broadband-High-Latency-Blockhouse-Bay/m-p/202317/highlight/false#M18804

tdgeek

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Reply # 1610332 11-Aug-2016 21:16

One person supports this post

With no real info, it sounds like the Dropbox was saturating your uplink, and while the downlink has much capability, the used up uplink bottlenecked the connection?

jlittle

75 posts

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Reply # 1610354 11-Aug-2016 22:05

I had a similar experience last week, on ADSL2. pings to Google on 8.8.8.8 would be 50-something ms, then steadlily lengthen before they dropped off altogether; I recall seeing one that was 50 s (50,000 ms). After some device isolation, the problem was traced to a Win 10 laptop with MS OneDrive; OneDrive was attempting to backup some multi-GB VM's the laptop's owner had put on her desktop. It was like Vodafone was penalizing our connection (we're on an unlimited plan).

She stopped OneDrive (the laptop was new, I think it came turned on) and problem solved.

hio77

'That VDSL Cat'
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Spark

Subscriber

Reply # 1610357 11-Aug-2016 22:14

One person supports this post

This is simple saturation of a connection, Not unsurprising at all. So absolutely attributable to ANY isp.

If your not aware that it can cause the issue though, Definitely something to take note of.

in terms of mitigation, obviously throttling helps however it wont do the full way, You will still get jitters and issues.

At one point when dropbox usage was very heavy here, i was progressively attacking it with Queuing, which considering dropbox also make use of aws, can be like chasing an endless ghost.

my preferred way of handling it is a Codel based Queuing algorithm (in my case, FAIRQ with Codel extensions) on the router.

The second part of the problem with Queuing at the router level, is you still have the Modem that can make be the endall.

Often you wont even notice the issue itself in raw pings, but streaming from distant servers, tends to shine through the most obviously - how often do you get that spinny circle only while uploading even when limiting the speed!

As we move to higher upstream bandwidth connections, the issue does become less apparent.

Edit:

Reading through your thread, i note your pinging the default gateway for vodafone. Be careful doing this, Even under the same DSL sync, on different PPP sessions you will see different gateways quite often. Vodafone have a few pools out there with very mixed IPs.

Also, i have found them to be unreliable. More than likely deprioritizing ICMP packets.

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

possom

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 1610439 12-Aug-2016 08:45

Thanks for the replies, very insightful.