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[mikeb]

Why is it that PN appear to be severely restricting access to and transfer rates from certain sites such as rapidshare, google/youtube and some other streaming video sites ?

Following on from previous problems I had been experiencing with the above sites in particular and, in fact, browsing in general, I have pretty much come to the conclusion that they are being intentionally squashed within the PN network for whatever reason rather than there being a genuine load, network or server problem somewhere.

During all of today up until midnight, all I could achieve was a transfer rate of typically <<10 kB/s with the usual occasional bursts of data, long periods of inactivity and a generally erratic performance. The absolute max transfer rate during bursts appears to be around 30 kB/s with occasionally as much as 50 kB/s but the average over time was still only about 10% of that. This is much the same as it has been for the past week whereas I have never experienced much less than line speed at any time on any of my occasional previous uses of these sites.  In addition to transfer rate problems, all attempted transfers or streams generally stall part way through thus requiring starting again from scratch several times with little or no guarantee of running to completion.

However, shortly after midnight it became a consistent rock solid maxed out line speed.  Now, 1 hour later it is back to a crazy slow erratic rate again and although not quite so bad as earlier not that far from it. Exactly the same thing occurred the other night as well so it would appear to be rather more than a strange coincidence.  All the indications are that full speed is available between 00:00 and 01:00 and virtually nothing outside of these hours.

Is this a fundamental bug in traffic management or are PN now classifying all traffic to/from certain sites as low priority 'bronze' traffic and therefore effectively preventing access to them ?  If so, when are PN going to advise users of precisely which sites as well as which protocols are being intentionally restricted by traffic management (apparently regardless of an individual users particular level of usage over the month) and will therefore be unusable via the PN network for some/most/all of the time ?

[petervaughan]

I've noticed a number of P2P search sites appear to be restricted during the day but are fine after midnight. One example is www.mininova.org which is almost unusable during the day with frequent timeouts and very slow page refreshng, put hey-presto, come 12.30am ish, the site is very quick and no delays appear.

This does look very suspicious to me 

[dhookham]

I've had a ~60MB download running from rapidshare since just after 11pm...

From then until just after midnight, I was getting between 10-20k/s. At just after midnight it reached 30-40k/s. Since around 2am, it's been lucky to get past 30k/s.

Youtube has been pretty much useless today - when a person on Orange dial-up can cache a video faster than my alleged "up to 8mbps", there's something very very wrong. Whether it's wonky ellacoya sigs, or intentional rate-limiting on specific sites, it's just another example of the "Premier" experience being tarnished.

[IanTan9]

Youtube has been pretty much useless today - when a person on Orange dial-up can cache a video faster than my alleged "up to 8mbps",

This is strange and I wonder what if any variables playing a part here.My wife was wandering around YouTube most of yesterday evening without any apparent problems.With reference to your comment "up to 8mbps" that also is interesting as I am apparently getting better speeds at peak time now I have regraded back to IPStream 2000 than I was ever getting with MaxDsl up to 8mbps which suprises me somewhat. here is an example

20th Nov MaxDSL with router reporting sync speed of 7000 Kbps

20-11-2006 22:33:45 1638.6
20-11-2006 21:51:31 910.1
20-11-2006 20:31:18 532.3
20-11-2006 19:41:13 624.2
20-11-2006 17:34:49 1029.5
18-11-2006 16:16:38 964.6
18-11-2006 16:16:14 590.9

that was the day before my re-grade,now the figures on the day after my re-grade at peak time

Nov 22nd IPSteam 2000 with router reprting sync speed of 2272 Kbps

22-11-2006 22:13:51   1403.5
22-11-2006 21:38:55   1128.3
22-11-2006 20:30:57   1031.9
22-11-2006 19:57:02   1690.8
22-11-2006 18:55:34   1638.5
22-11-2006 18:51:10   1078.4
22-11-2006 17:43:43   1748.8
22-11-2006 17:43:12   1911.2

it may be not connected to the discussion, and may well be something and nothing, but I would have though that if Plusnet were doing anything their end......I would have expected the speed readings to be somewhat similar,and not in some cases giving me double the speed at during peak period.Which is why I am wondering if there are some variables involved that are not readily apparent.If anyone can explain if there are any reasons I should be seeing such a differnce in speed I would appreciate hearing about it,as I was expecting similar results from the speed tests....... as I said strange.

[fenlandbroadband]

Youtube has been pretty much useless today - when a person on Orange dial-up can cache a video faster than my alleged "up to 8mbps",

This is strange and I wonder what if any variables playing a part here.My wife was wandering around YouTube most of yesterday evening without any apparent problems.

I've also been noticing problems with YouTube in recent days (worse than normal) but I wasn't too sure if it's their servers or PlusNet. Pings seem to go skywards at cogentco so it might be more a routing issue...?

[bud]

I have been wondering the same, since this week the speeds I get on rapidshare have dropped from around 300KB/sec to a woeful 32KB/sec, and youtube has became useless to use with timeouts and video's taking so long to cache/download.  What annoyed me most last night though was when a user on AOL 1meg was able to get the whole video downloaded in the same time as it took me just to get a quarter of it.

[dhookham]

a user on AOL 1meg was able to get the whole video downloaded in the same time as it took me just to get a quarter of it.

Sadly, all I can add is... "It's The PlusNet Way" 

[mikeb]

So, it would appear that the answer (probably) is ... YES, PN are (quite possibly) restricting web traffic now ... although technically based on content rather than targeting specific sites as such.  I know the following quote says "investigating" but I kinda suspect that actually means "trying out and/or playing around with at the moment" going by the variety of problems seen recently

Historically all http traffic has been treated identically by our network. We are now investigating prioritising interactive web-browsing traffic above web-based file downloads so that browsing never slows down, but downloading large files over http may gradually slow at peak times. Web-based downloading remains in the gold queue but speeds will dynamically change according to the amount of titanium and other gold traffic on the network. This will specifically effect customers who are already in management levels 1, 2 or 3 on their Plus or Premier accounts as some customers are avoiding the restrictions on other download protocols and using http downloads to still consume very high amounts.

So that would perhaps explain why my occasional file DLs via HTTP have been "gradually slowed down at peak times" from ~200kB/s (on a 2M fixed speed connection) at virtually any time of the day/night for just about as long as I can remember to < 10kB/s  at virtually any time of the day/night recently then.  Methinks thou speaketh with forked tongue firmly planted in cheek if that constitutes a "gradual slow down at peak times" esp for a Premier user consuming well below the FUP BW limit, in fact even when counting all BW used over the last quarter as peak it's probably only just about there   In addition, going by the exceedingly erratic transfer rates I have been seeing, a bit of filtering on the real-time(ish) tweaking wouldn't go a miss either ! 

I also note that there seems to be distinct lag on the first occasion just about any site is accessed.  Is this due to some form of look-up to see if management is appropriate for the site about to be accessed or just the 'usual' DNS issues ? I'm not talking sites almost specifically for DLing stuff but normal run-of-the-mill sites BTW. Also, what constitutes "large" seeing that I note general images and so on often appear to be very slow to load on a fair few sites. If the management is also being intentionally applied to streaming data as well then that would presumably explain why streaming is virtually unusable also

Mind you, I think from memory the the FUP limit on peak is 13GB - which effectively means maintaining an average DL rate of ~15kB/s running for the 8 peak hours per day on every day of the billing month so at least there is absolutely no chance of me ever getting anywhere close to breaching the FUP then even if I was sad/d@ft/bored/desperate enough to want to try

[mikeb]

OK, I've just checked rapidshare again and got <5 kB/s on a random file (~13MB) and the DL [Censored]ped out at 97% complete which is just about par for the course recently

So I have uploaded a couple of test files and it would be interesting to see what other peeps manage to get, particularly if they also have access to a non-PN connection   The two files are just zero-filled BTW so nothing dodgy or even remotely exciting  

Interesting to note at this time that I UL'd them at a very consistent 30 kB/s which is just about tops for a 2M fixed speed connection (I think) but my DL speeds were a massive 7.6 kB/s and 5.3 kB/s respectively and wildly erratic with long pauses of inactivity.  Both UL and DL were via Level3 network.  Jolly nice ... NOT but at least both DLs completed this time.  I will be doing ftp and HTTP via my webspace tests a bit later just to see what happens there.

If anyone fancies trying it out to provide a comparison with the figures above then it would be appreciated and the links are below:


ONE MEG TEST FILE

http://rapidshare.com/files/5083108/onemeg.tst.html


TEN MEG TEST FILE

http://rapidshare.com/files/5084319/tenmeg.tst.html

[Oldjim]

Oscillated between 26kBps and 35kBps on a 3000kbps stable rate and a speed test of 983 kbps - normally doesn't drop below 2000 kbps

[amcclean]

I often wonder if www.plus.net is also traffic managed:-) Everytime there's an outage it gets slower so people can't use it see what's going on.

It's also slow generaly. maybe it's managed so that we can all use the connection better for other things.

A

[petervaughan]

2 things that could cause that.

1) When things go wrong, lots more people visit the portal which in turn slows it down as it can't cope - in fact it can't cope most of the time now hence....

2) The portal is known to be slow and has a lot of server-side code which is in the process of being re-written to speed things up.

[biondani]

TEN MEG TEST FILE

http://rapidshare.com/files/5084319/tenmeg.tst.html

300 KB/s on a congested EntaNet pipe. My stable rate is 4.5Mb.

Ian

[NB]

Hmm strange one this.  The 1 meg file from the Cogent Mirror came down at ~25k/s but the 10 Meg file from the Level 3 Mirror came down at 229K/s right after it about 1 min ago.

[mikeb]

Thanks for info guys.  I too have sometimes seen transfer rates of 30 - 50 kB/s but only for individual bursts of data.  Due to the frequent and often long pauses in data transfer plus the very erratic rate, the average generally falls to about 10% of that.  I have also, on a couple of rare occasions, seen transfers at full speed but ONLY between 00:00 and 01:00 (like I have just now at 00:25 but I have no doubt it will return to earlier performance in 35 mins !) Here's the summary of my tests this evening:

Code:

        FTP U/L   FTP D/L   HTTP D/L   EXT FTP   EXT HTTP   RAPIDSHARE
        =======   =======   ========   =======   ========   ==========

1 MB       24       85        185         -         -          7.6
10 MB      24       67        200        150       139         5.3


All transfer rates are in kB/s on a 2M fixed speed connection. 
File size for external DLs was 8.5 MB rather than the 10 MB test file
used for other tests.

There are no reported problems with rapidshare, their networks were <50% loaded, other users are getting SIGNIFICANTLY better rates and other ISP users are getting VERY SIGNIFICANTLY better rates. Transfers to/from other systems and sites appear generally about normal for my connection at this time of day but are usually a bit better than that. In the past I have always achieved near line speed with most transfers even with their network running at near 100% load and during busy times on PN.  All this changed as if by magic just over a week ago. Co-incidence ? Nah, something or someone somewhere within PN Towers appears to be playing silly b*ggers ! 

So it's long past time to 'fess up Mr.Plusnet !  My money is on PN treating  ALL traffic to/from radpidshare et al as if it's P2P. Even the web page itself takes an age to load now.  Although I have never used P2P, my understanding from reading posts on message boards various is that some PN users are getting sub dial-up speeds, other PN users are getting 10's kB/s and occasionally, a few users are getting full speed.  Needless to say, users of other ISPs are getting significantly better.  Looks exactly the same symptoms to me so come on PN, tell the truth and shame the devil ... or convince me it's something else entirely 

PS: I have very little urine left to extract so it's probably not a very good idea to continue trying to take more at the moment