Re: connection dropping out or slowing to dial-up speeds
UNS Support
> Problem: downloading headers and files.
> Groups: All binaries groups
>
> Observer qualifications:
> 1. I have been with UNS for over 8 years, so I know what 'usual and
> normal' service is like.
> 2. I'm an Engineer with 15 years experience responsible for 50+
> computers on a corporate WAN.
>
> Symptoms:
> 0.Symptoms occur at all times of the day and night. noon, 4pm, 2am,
> 1pm, 6am, whenever.
> 1. Downloading speeds are normally 6.5 megabits/sec where my cable
> modem is capped.
> 2. Downloading begins at normal 6.5 megabit/sec speeds but after 45-60
> seconds, download either stops entirely (after a 90 second timeout
> wait) or drops to 0.3 megabits/sec or less.
> 3. Ping times during normal downloads and during speed drops are
> 45-60mS. No lost packets are indicated.
> 4. Traceroutes show 9-11 hops with no hops showing more than 35-50mS
> latency.
> 5. Stopping (going off-line completely) and resuming download results
> in the same kind of activity with speeds starting at normal levels and
> then dropping off.
>
> Observations:
> 1. The speed drops are relatively consistent, beginning Saturday
> evenings and continuing through Monday evenings.(Eastern US time.)
> 2. Broken or incomplete articles seem to appear more in the
> Saturday-Monday time frame than during the Tuesday-Friday times.
> 3. When I post articles during the Saturday-Monday time frame many
> smaller articles (under 25 lines) never appear or larger multipart
> articles are incomplete or broken.
>
> Questions:
> 1. Are the speed drops due to saturation (overloading) of the
> usenetserver infrastructure or because of general bandwidth
> limitations?
> 2. Why do weekends (Saturday-Monday time frames) have the most
> problems with speeds?
> 3. Why are more articles damaged or incomplete during the weekend
> (Saturday-Monday) time frames?
>
> Sign me as:
> Engineer wanting answers to engineering questions.
We apologize for the delayed response.
The speed drops do not match any traffic trends on our end. The best way
for us to analyze this is to have you provide both a regular trace (from
you to us) and a reverse trace (from us to you) to see what both paths look
like. https://accounts.usenetserver.com/action/traceroute.php
Have you tried changing ports to see if this improves your speeds?
We currently offer the following port options: 119 (default), 20, 23, 25,
3128, 7000, 8000 and 9000. Try each port for about 15 minutes to get a
true gauge if any improvement is truly occurring.
We did have an issue on the weekend of August 8th and August 9th with
incomplete headers due to an out of synch frontend server. The bodies for
all posts were available via Message ID searches and NZBs. We corrected
that issue and the missing headers should now appear. If you saw
incomplete files and/or incomplete headers this past weekend, please
provide a few sample message IDs from the affected sets so we can further
investigate.
Thanks,
Mark
UNS Support