[Snap] Horrendous lag on international traffic/twitch.

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › [Snap] Horrendous lag on international traffic/twitch.

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4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1189993 6-Dec-2014 22:38

michaelmurfy:
ddwwqqaa: I'm also experiencing recent issues with Snap 100/50 UFB (Auckland). From the testing I've done it seems to be all international traffic. If I download any of the Linux Mint distros from servers that aren't located in NZ, it's really slow.

Ensure you're using Ethernet then download via http://ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz for all your *nix goodness, it should max out your line.

My issue isn't downloading Linux, I was just using their wide range of international servers as an example.

Otagolad

364 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1191607 8-Dec-2014 14:24

I recently had issues with UFB speeds to the Snap Christchurch server but now back to normal (197 down and 217 up), however my international speeds are still horrendous and anything I'm streaming etc. internationally is stuttering, buffering and causing real issues to watch (which on 200/200 UFB really shouldn't be happening) - recent test to the Dreamhost LA Server I am getting 5Mb/s down and 2.6Mb/s down.

Spoke to Snap and they are saying there is no international issue and that the "PoP Snap-08" issue doesn't exist, whereas it looks from comments here either it does or Snap are badly managing their international connections for UFB customers.

Talkiet

4792 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1191611 8-Dec-2014 14:33

Otagolad: I recently had issues with UFB speeds to the Snap Christchurch server but now back to normal (197 down and 217 up), however my international speeds are still horrendous and anything I'm streaming etc. internationally is stuttering, buffering and causing real issues to watch (which on 200/200 UFB really shouldn't be happening) - recent test to the Dreamhost LA Server I am getting 5Mb/s down and 2.6Mb/s down.

Spoke to Snap and they are saying there is no international issue and that the "PoP Snap-08" issue doesn't exist, whereas it looks from comments here either it does or Snap are badly managing their international connections for UFB customers.

A little bit of devils advocate here, but why should the speed of your ACCESS have anything to do with the performance of international websites?. (Answer, beyond a certain level, it doesn't have an effect)

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

HawK89

75 posts

Master Geek

#1191650 8-Dec-2014 15:18

Talkiet: A little bit of devils advocate here, but why should the speed of your ACCESS have anything to do with the performance of international websites?. (Answer, beyond a certain level, it doesn't have an effect)

Cheers - N

I saw D1NZ post a speedtest result to the US, LA, DreamHost server and got these speeds below. So I think other Snap customers would like to get similar results with the same service they are paying for.

EDIT: Slow speeds result in constant buffering when trying to watch high quality live streams.

Otagolad

364 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1191685 8-Dec-2014 16:22

HawK89:
Talkiet: A little bit of devils advocate here, but why should the speed of your ACCESS have anything to do with the performance of international websites?. (Answer, beyond a certain level, it doesn't have an effect)

Cheers - N

I saw D1NZ post a speedtest result to the US, LA, DreamHost server and got these speeds below. So I think other Snap customers would like to get similar results with the same service they are paying for.

EDIT: Slow speeds result in constant buffering when trying to watch high quality live streams.

HawK89 - totally agree with this (nuts that someone in the same city (Christchurch) on the same local fibre network (Enable) and with the same internet provider should have such different international speedtest results. Also, since moving from 100/50 to 200/200 UFB my international streams have deteriorated markedly - prior to the move they were excellent (defaulted to highest quality) - coincidence? mabye but I don't think so.

HawK89

75 posts

Master Geek

#1191738 8-Dec-2014 18:00

Otagolad: totally agree with this (nuts that someone in the same city (Christchurch) on the same local fibre network (Enable) and with the same internet provider should have such different international speedtest results. Also, since moving from 100/50 to 200/200 UFB my international streams have deteriorated markedly - prior to the move they were excellent (defaulted to highest quality) - coincidence? mabye but I don't think so.

Actually, this happened to me pretty much exact. I got my 200/200 plan around 20th Nov (can't remember exact date) and I had those amazing 200Mbps speeds for about 3 days at least, until I noticed the dreaded buffering on twitch.tv. Only now I have sent Snap! an email due to seeing a response of this on Geekzone forums. Still waiting for a human reply and a fix. Will pass on the info when it's resolved.

mercutio

1392 posts

Uber Geek

#1192164 9-Dec-2014 13:28

Talkiet:
Otagolad: I recently had issues with UFB speeds to the Snap Christchurch server but now back to normal (197 down and 217 up), however my international speeds are still horrendous and anything I'm streaming etc. internationally is stuttering, buffering and causing real issues to watch (which on 200/200 UFB really shouldn't be happening) - recent test to the Dreamhost LA Server I am getting 5Mb/s down and 2.6Mb/s down.

Spoke to Snap and they are saying there is no international issue and that the "PoP Snap-08" issue doesn't exist, whereas it looks from comments here either it does or Snap are badly managing their international connections for UFB customers.

A little bit of devils advocate here, but why should the speed of your ACCESS have anything to do with the performance of international websites?. (Answer, beyond a certain level, it doesn't have an effect)

I've noticed that local access performance can impact performance significantly. A lot of it to my mind has to do with packet loss and behave of the connection at load - now days it's easy to congest a connection from all these close servers etc. Steam is one of the worst offenders as it uses multiple connections at once.

If you download from a close server fast and the ISP doesn't have proper AQM on the connection then often performance will deteroriate pretty badly for interactive high bandwidth high latency connections but be fine for bittorrent etc.

It's somewhat akin to how BUBA made international performance terrible but often national and bittorrent performance were fine.

This is one of the biggest things I have against Truenet - in the real world there are often a lot of simultaneous connections and slightly loaded connections, but instead they are testing idle connections with sequential tests that favour connections that burst shortly rather than behave well under load. (also they're not measuring average performance, but instead maximum performance -- they cull out outliers. speedtest has some similar weaknesses)

I've noticed that Global Gateway has some weird load balancing stuff where connections to Los Angeles jump around between about 135 and 170 msec but usually within 5 msec jitter on that connection, but some of the connections will have quite a lot of jitter compared to others. I haven't tested packet loss. But traceroute will often stay the same, but doing a tcp connection the tcp connection will behave the same for the duration of the connection. The easiest way to test this is just to do a few single connection downloads and see wildly varying performance.

In my limited testing I managed to get some burst loss to Japan, but with tcp retransmit times etc ping would jump from about 150 to 800+msec then be fine again.

It is really hard to determine where a fault is happening, and now days icmp deprioritisation is rampant showing spurious packet loss with some routers, and inband tcp latency tests don't seem to be very common. Also most providers are only aiming to be below 0.5% packet loss which impacts new zealand traffic a lot, where we more want below 0.05% packet loss or such.

Snap's access characteristics changed from BUBA to EUBA, and often there was more packet loss at low-use times. And so I wouldn't be surprised if it's behaving differently. It seems there is normally the same queue length on Euba ADSL connections, which gives too much queueing on slow ADSL connections, and too little on fast ADSL connections, so even if there is the same queue length on 100 megabit as 200 megabit there may be more overruns on 200 megabit.

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162 posts

Master Geek

#1194771 10-Dec-2014 12:01

Estimated Time of Restoration for Sea-Me-We 3 link is 25/12/2014.

Traffic is being redirected through Hong Kong.

Otagolad

364 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1202560 23-Dec-2014 11:17

I'm not sure what has happened at Snap with international speeds, however I'm now struggling to stream NFL GamePass (which was always rock-solid) and Netflix and Hulu are buffering like crazy - this never occurred when I was on the 100/50 plan and seems only to have started around the time I moved to 200/200.

Anyone else having issues?

D1NZ

194 posts

Master Geek

#1203281 24-Dec-2014 15:31

Otagolad: I'm not sure what has happened at Snap with international speeds, however I'm now struggling to stream NFL GamePass (which was always rock-solid) and Netflix and Hulu are buffering like crazy - this never occurred when I was on the 100/50 plan and seems only to have started around the time I moved to 200/200.

Anyone else having issues?

Your best bet prolly give Snap a call, not having any speed issues here.

HawK89

75 posts

Master Geek

#1203353 24-Dec-2014 18:33

Otagolad: I'm not sure what has happened at Snap with international speeds, however I'm now struggling to stream NFL GamePass (which was always rock-solid) and Netflix and Hulu are buffering like crazy - this never occurred when I was on the 100/50 plan and seems only to have started around the time I moved to 200/200.

Anyone else having issues?

I had these exact problems. I sent a bunch of emails until I got in contact with a technical engineer than a helpdesk rep. I did a bunch of tests displaying that it was a problem on their end and nothing with my setup. They switched my network profile (200Mbps down to 100Mbps) and ran some more tests. They suggested that it was a problem between Enable and Snap!. They did some more changes and told me to do the tests again, which involved speedtests from different servers/locations via HTTP and FTP, as well as multi connection downloads.
Nothing was working to get my connection to the 200Mbps both ways. I also purchased the 7490 Fritz!box router only for the A.C. wireless @ $199 if I returned my current router in perfect condition, to which it was.
Once I plugged in the new router, I no longer had any of those speed problems. I told Snap! about it and they have yet to tell me why that was the case, but honestly I don't even care now. As long as I get what I pay for, I'll be on my way going about my day.

Here is the link I gave Snap! to look over; https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-tgcdd-boydMHZYMWJHOVhKZGM&usp=sharing
It was about an hour downtime between tests done on the 15th of December when I swapped the routers.

You are welcome to do your own speedtests in the same fashion as I have.

D1NZ

194 posts

Master Geek

#1203384 24-Dec-2014 20:01

HawK89:
Otagolad: I'm not sure what has happened at Snap with international speeds, however I'm now struggling to stream NFL GamePass (which was always rock-solid) and Netflix and Hulu are buffering like crazy - this never occurred when I was on the 100/50 plan and seems only to have started around the time I moved to 200/200.

Anyone else having issues?

I had these exact problems. I sent a bunch of emails until I got in contact with a technical engineer than a helpdesk rep. I did a bunch of tests displaying that it was a problem on their end and nothing with my setup. They switched my network profile (200Mbps down to 100Mbps) and ran some more tests. They suggested that it was a problem between Enable and Snap!. They did some more changes and told me to do the tests again, which involved speedtests from different servers/locations via HTTP and FTP, as well as multi connection downloads.
Nothing was working to get my connection to the 200Mbps both ways. I also purchased the 7490 Fritz!box router only for the A.C. wireless @ $199 if I returned my current router in perfect condition, to which it was.
Once I plugged in the new router, I no longer had any of those speed problems. I told Snap! about it and they have yet to tell me why that was the case, but honestly I don't even care now. As long as I get what I pay for, I'll be on my way going about my day.

Here is the link I gave Snap! to look over; https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-tgcdd-boydMHZYMWJHOVhKZGM&usp=sharing
It was about an hour downtime between tests done on the 15th of December when I swapped the routers.

You are welcome to do your own speedtests in the same fashion as I have.

Good to hear you have your problem sorted, hope Otagolad have his problem sort out soon too tho, btw guys Merry Christmas.

Lorenceo

904 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1203497 25-Dec-2014 01:15

I've started noticing the twitch buffering recently as well.
In the past I've had very consistent performance on twitch.tv.
Started noticing buffering when the first Snap hop changed from 111.69.17.16 to 111.69.35.57

Twitch player stats when it's buffering:
https://i.imgur.com/cl4VX3A.png

Traceroute to server content was coming from:
Tracing route to video21.sfo01.justin.tv [199.9.248.173]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms Router [192.168.2.1]
2     5 ms     5 ms     5 ms 57.35.69.111.static.snap.net.nz [111.69.35.57]
3     5 ms     5 ms     5 ms 56.35.69.111.static.snap.net.nz [111.69.35.56]
4     5 ms     5 ms     7 ms 32.27.69.111.static.snap.net.nz [111.69.27.32]
5     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms 33.27.69.111.static.snap.net.nz [111.69.27.33]
6     8 ms     8 ms     5 ms ae5-2.akbr7.global-gateway.net.nz [210.55.202.213]
7     7 ms     7 ms    11 ms ae1-10.tkbr12.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.232.37]
8   132 ms   131 ms   132 ms xe2-3-1.lebr7.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.127.22]
9   135 ms   162 ms   162 ms ae3-10.sjbr3.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.127.25]
10   162 ms   162 ms   162 ms ae0.pabr5.global-gateway.net.nz [203.96.120.74]
11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
12     *        *        *     Request timed out.

I had the same stream going via both Snap and Spark at the same time. It played via the Spark connection with no buffering at all, which is what Snap used to be like for me.
Both connections were idle apart from the stream. Snap tested via Ethernet, Spark via wireless.

Rather disappointing, considering how consistent Snap has been in the past. :(

HawK89

75 posts

Master Geek

#1203831 26-Dec-2014 00:59

Best to email Snap for a response. If they sound surprised with your poor internet performance, then you may have to argue the fact that it works completely fine on another connection at the same time to get escalated to someone who can make changes.

Otagolad

364 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1206175 30-Dec-2014 19:00

HawK89:
Otagolad: I'm not sure what has happened at Snap with international speeds, however I'm now struggling to stream NFL GamePass (which was always rock-solid) and Netflix and Hulu are buffering like crazy - this never occurred when I was on the 100/50 plan and seems only to have started around the time I moved to 200/200.

Anyone else having issues?

I had these exact problems. I sent a bunch of emails until I got in contact with a technical engineer than a helpdesk rep. I did a bunch of tests displaying that it was a problem on their end and nothing with my setup. They switched my network profile (200Mbps down to 100Mbps) and ran some more tests. They suggested that it was a problem between Enable and Snap!. They did some more changes and told me to do the tests again, which involved speedtests from different servers/locations via HTTP and FTP, as well as multi connection downloads.
Nothing was working to get my connection to the 200Mbps both ways. I also purchased the 7490 Fritz!box router only for the A.C. wireless @ $199 if I returned my current router in perfect condition, to which it was.
Once I plugged in the new router, I no longer had any of those speed problems. I told Snap! about it and they have yet to tell me why that was the case, but honestly I don't even care now. As long as I get what I pay for, I'll be on my way going about my day.

Here is the link I gave Snap! to look over; https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-tgcdd-boydMHZYMWJHOVhKZGM&usp=sharing
It was about an hour downtime between tests done on the 15th of December when I swapped the routers.

You are welcome to do your own speedtests in the same fashion as I have.

Thanks HawK89 - I have tried to escalate this with Snap by phone and hopefully now some progress will be made. Your before and after speedtests make for particularly interesting viewing, given that your before speeds are about the same as mine.

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