Have 100Mbs connection to Citylink but speeds seem a bit slow (national)

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lchiu7

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#91311 11-Oct-2011 09:42

Just upgraded my connection to Citylink from 25Mbs to 100Mbs and then through to the ISP. There are not many hops from our location to the ISP and I don't think even it crosses the WIX.

Here is a tracert from a local machine connected directly to the firewall/router

Tracing route to dts.net.nz [202.20.5.181]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1     2 ms     2 ms    <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2    13 ms     *        6 ms dts-dts1-c4-gw.dts.net.nz [202.20.3.1]
3    11 ms    10 ms     8 ms 202.20.5.181

But when I do a speedtest to Citylink I get these numbers

Does that look right? I can't believe with the low number of links between our location and the ISP we would see such a drop in speed

Thanks

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#531826 11-Oct-2011 10:30

There are a number of things that can cause this, What is between your computer and the Citylink demark point? It could be your router isn't upto the task

Most problems are the result of previous solutions...

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cyril7

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#531836 11-Oct-2011 11:05

+1, who lives at 192.168.1.1

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sbiddle

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#531880 11-Oct-2011 12:02

The first thing to check would be the router, there are a lot out there, even "business" grade devices that aren't capable of routing anywhere near 100Mbps.

garvani

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#531903 11-Oct-2011 12:25

sbiddle: The first thing to check would be the router, there are a lot out there, even "business" grade devices that aren't capable of routing anywhere near 100Mbps.

^ This. The amount of grief gen-i have given us with there sub-par sonicwall installations! We are installing 30Mbs fibre connections across Blenheim, and the sonicwall's throughput is about 8Mbs.. our fibre is slower than dsl! no your firewall is pants! :)

sbiddle

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#531928 11-Oct-2011 13:08

garvani:
sbiddle: The first thing to check would be the router, there are a lot out there, even "business" grade devices that aren't capable of routing anywhere near 100Mbps.

^ This. The amount of grief gen-i have given us with there sub-par sonicwall installations! We are installing 30Mbs fibre connections across Blenheim, and the sonicwall's throughput is about 8Mbs.. our fibre is slower than dsl! no your firewall is pants! :)

I was playing with a Gigabit Zyxel business router the other week that can only route 50Mbps.

tprice42

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#531953 11-Oct-2011 14:12

The trouble with speed tests is that the are an indication only, especially when you have a circuit speed over 50Mbps. This website has some interesting info on 'bandwidth * delay product': http://www.speedguide.net/analyzer.php

Essentially it means that if you have a default TCP receive window of 64240 as i have there then my 100Mbps circuit will acheive the following maximum single TCP stream throughput of the following amounts at the following latencies:

1ms: 64240 / 1 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
2ms: 64240 / 2 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
3ms: 64240 / 3 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
4ms: 64240 / 4 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
5ms: 64240 / 5 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
6ms: 64240 / 6 * 8 / 1000 = 85.5Mbps
7ms: 64240 / 7 * 8 / 1000 = 73.4Mbps
8ms: 64240 / 8 * 8 / 1000 = 64.2Mbps
9ms: 64240 / 9 * 8 / 1000 = 57.1Mbps
10ms: 64240 / 10 * 8 / 1000 = 51.4Mbps

Thats also not taking into account server limitations and how fast they can get data off disk.

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Ragnor

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#531973 11-Oct-2011 15:41

garvani:
sbiddle: The first thing to check would be the router, there are a lot out there, even "business" grade devices that aren't capable of routing anywhere near 100Mbps.

^ This. The amount of grief gen-i have given us with there sub-par sonicwall installations! We are installing 30Mbs fibre connections across Blenheim, and the sonicwall's throughput is about 8Mbs.. our fibre is slower than dsl! no your firewall is pants! :)

What model? Even NSA 240 can do 50-100Mbit in my experience, though we did turn off un-needed services like client av enforcement etc.

garvani

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#531982 11-Oct-2011 15:56

I couldn't tell you the model# off the top of my head but next time im over there ill have a look and let you know (should be in the next couple of days). I do know that spam and AV is on. By-passing the router gains full throughput, with it going through the sonicwall its about 1/3 of the speed it should be.

tprice42

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#531983 11-Oct-2011 15:56

That is the key i think, most Sonicwalls come with all most, if not all services enabled by default and you have to configure them specific to the environment. Good on Sonicwall though for publishing throughput specs for their devices that are only really achievable with every advanced feature turned off which negates the their purpose.

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#531999 11-Oct-2011 16:32

wat

I am running pfSense on a terrible slow and old machine and it easily passes gigabit speeds both in and out simultaneously.

garvani

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#532002 11-Oct-2011 16:35

Yes but pfsense and a dedicated $1200 hardware firewall are not one in the same.

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Ragnor

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#532042 11-Oct-2011 18:16

garvani: Yes but pfsense and a dedicated $1200 hardware firewall are not one in the same.

For Sonicwall it seems that:

TZ series RRP starts ~$250 USD and simply aren't spec'd for higher throughput
NSA series RRP starts ~$1200 USD and have decent throughput from what I've seen

Interested in what model is it, there's a pretty big difference.

lchiu7

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#532070 11-Oct-2011 19:40

As the OP I find some of these comments quite useful.

1. The router is spec'ed to handle 100Mbs of regular traffic and 60Mbs of ISPEC traffic. I am running regular traffic so that should not be an issue.

tprice42: The trouble with speed tests is that the are an indication only, especially when you have a circuit speed over 50Mbps. This website has some interesting info on 'bandwidth * delay product': http://www.speedguide.net/analyzer.php

Essentially it means that if you have a default TCP receive window of 64240 as i have there then my 100Mbps circuit will acheive the following maximum single TCP stream throughput of the following amounts at the following latencies:

1ms: 64240 / 1 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
2ms: 64240 / 2 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
3ms: 64240 / 3 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
4ms: 64240 / 4 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
5ms: 64240 / 5 * 8 / 1000 = 100Mbps
6ms: 64240 / 6 * 8 / 1000 = 85.5Mbps
7ms: 64240 / 7 * 8 / 1000 = 73.4Mbps
8ms: 64240 / 8 * 8 / 1000 = 64.2Mbps
9ms: 64240 / 9 * 8 / 1000 = 57.1Mbps
10ms: 64240 / 10 * 8 / 1000 = 51.4Mbps

Thats also not taking into account server limitations and how fast they can get data off disk.

This could be an issue. At the request of the ISP I tried two tests. Most of the tests I had been doing had been with a standard Windows 7 desktop accessing the connection via a proxy server. The server is running Windows Server 2008 with two NICs in it, one on the local LAN and one connected to the Internet connection.

When I tried a test with a Win7 desktop connected to the router directly the results were worse and latency increased. That seems counter intuitive but it could be because the Win7 machine has a default TCP receive Window while the server is better optimised?

Is there a better speed measuring site?

My main traffic on the connection won't be http, it's mainly SFTP in the evenings which is when I want the speed to move data between two locations. I want to also create a site to site VPN and connect two Windows Servers. I want to be able to deliver output from queries running from a SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services instance in the remote server to clients running the local location.

I am using a Linksys/Cisco RV042 router. It is supposed to be able to handle this speed.

Does anybody have a suggestion for a better device that can handle this line speed and perhaps have an improved firewall capability?

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sbiddle

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#532083 11-Oct-2011 20:27

Get a decent router, there isn't a hope in the world of an RV042 routing anywhere close to 100Mbps LAN to WAN or WAN to LAN.

sbiddle

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#532086 11-Oct-2011 20:31

A Google search for the stats (I've used one of these before and they were horrible like a lot of the Cisco SMB stuff) lead me to this which has performance stats that stack up pretty closely with what you're seeing

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-reviews/30186-linksys-rv042-review-solid-dual-wan-vpn-performer?showall=&start=4%20

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