What's with the reliability lately?

[zappaDPJ]

Not sure if you use Youtube a lot Zap but I've noticed problems with it too but seems to be Google related rather than ISP related because as you know am on a different ISP.

Pretty much what Simon says above but iPlayer, Sky Player and ITV Player have all been quite bad recently, loads of buffering and quite often I just can't get the content to start. I appear to have more than sufficient bandwidth when this occurs so I wouldn't rule out a server issue.

[Rik]

The broadcasters have been pushing their 'catch up' services a lot lately, I wonder if they've been caught out by demand?

[pctech]

Not sure about Sky but ITV and iPlayer seem to stream from an Akamai cache which in my case is local because its integrated into the network and is streaming smoothly.

Might be an idea to start a program and then run a netstat (not sure of the equivalent command in Linux) and look for established connections to anything mentioning Akamai and then run a tracert to it to perhaps indicate the route its taking and then post here?

[sof2er]

Month Ago:


Now:

[Lance]

I seem to remember that IDNet have a peering arrangement with the BBC (which enabled multicast streaming when that was being tested). I wonder if that helps when pulling something down on iPlayer?

[pctech]

I think its now cached instead Lance as Zen have a similar agreement (and were also testing multicast) but when I stream from iPlayer it always comes from the Akamai caches which in my case are on the Zen network and the traffic only has to travel over one 10 gig link.

[armadillo]

I just assumed it was a quirk in the way the LAN accesses the router. I frequently get this:



Clicking "try again" always works. And it can happen even if I'm already on the site and it happens with any or all sites apparently at random. I first noticed it when I migrated to IDnet. But that also coincided with when I changed from using a USB modem to using a router. I just assumed that the LAN doesn't always find the router. It's no great problem. Nothing else seems to fail and downloads go through fine.

[Rik]

Are you sure your line hasn't dropped briefly, Dill? I had the same thing three times yesterday.

[pctech]

Might be advisable to put IDNet's DNS server addresses directly into Windows as sometimes the router can not answer the requests.

[Rik]

Yes, that's well worth doing.

[armadillo]

No the line hasn't dropped. Nothing shows up on router stats and LAN and WAN up time are both unaffected.

I agree I could put the DNS servers in explicitly but I tend to think I might as well leave it alone, since it's no more than a tiny irritation.

[Rik]

The only other thing I can think of is the server was busy, but it shouldn't generate that error.

[armadillo]

True. It would give a "taking too long to respond" error, I think. But the error I do get also comes up if I unplug the LAN cable from the router. And also if I type in a non-existent web address. So I think it's impossible to distinguish between a DNS error and a failure for the PC to find the router, unless there is a consistent error on one or more site addresses.

[Rik]

You're right there, intermittent faults are a real pain to track down.

[armadillo]

I just wonder if the faults that are the subject of the whole thread are just examples of such intermittent faults.

BTW, when you talk of inputting the DNS addresses explicitly, do you mean

HERE (1)



or HERE (2)



or both?

I tend not to mess with things that work most of the time!

[Rik]

1, Dill. If you change it in the router, it forces a resync, changing it in Windows doesn't.

[armadillo]

Thanks Rik. But I think I'll go and cook some food instead!

[Steve]

D.N.S  = Do Not Starve

[Rik]

[Bill]

Well, my latency peaks look the same on OpenDNS, so it's back to IDNet's servers and a working IPv6

[Lance]

Might be advisable to put IDNet's DNS server addresses directly into Windows as sometimes the router can not answer the requests.

Very good advice. I used to get the problem of the website not loading but when I entered the DNS servers directly into windows the problem went away instantly.

[Steve]

Plus it's a very quick way of ruling out any DNS issues as it's a simple to swop from one to the other

[armadillo]

Ok, I've now entered the IDnet DNS addresses directly so it will be interesting to see if I ever get that Firefox error again.

Did Not Starve worked well too! I'm always happier after food.

[Bill]

My latency spikes seem to have gone away...



So either switching to OpenDNS and back cured it (unlikely) or whatever was causing it has finished/been fixed

How about the others who've been seeing a similar effect?

[Glenn]

That is my current graph