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[Alex Atkin UK]

I have an interesting one for you.

Me and my friend in Texas regularly send files to each other.  They usually do his line speed but over the past month or so things have suddenly gone very wrong.

Sending him files over XMPP I used to do 10Mbit, its fallen to nearer 16KiB as whatever is upsetting this is impacting XMPP more than other protocols.
If he downloads directly off my NAS he might get 250KiB/s average.

It doesn't matter if he pulls via Plusnet or Zen this end, something is going wrong between us.

I rented a VPS in Texas and checked against various speedtest.net servers in Texas and the US general, something is very off in the transatlantic.  On the upload test they will hang around 2Mbit for quite a while before working their way up to a point where sometimes they might get into double digits, sometimes they wont.  At an absolute push it will reach 10Mbit, but its kinda random.

Has anyone else noticed issues accessing the US?

[burakkucat]

A blockage in the "fat pipe"? 

I can't say that I have noticed anything odd. I regularly connect to both the east & the west coasts of the US and everything is quite normal for me.

[j0hn]

I just picked 3 random Texas servers on speedtest.net
They all maxed out my 160/30 connection.
The downstream took a while to build up but the upstream was pretty instantly above 30Mb/s.

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/7437523201

I don't have any other means of testing transatlantic links.

[niemand]

More likely the transit and peering between his ISP, yours and intermediate - Transatlantic is fine.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/38256af8-03c9-4aa0-b172-dc1935949fc4
https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/a38f44c3-d3ef-446f-b432-9d38d22173ad
https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/fc245c25-e484-4b36-b96b-7680f30adcd0
https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/c1628ddf-6a2a-46fa-9211-c3800a543b19

EDIT: Degradation across Transatlantic links would require something genuinely catastrophic and would be headline news. There are several cables and several geographically diverse routes.

[broadstairs]

Interesting that someone else has seen issues. I am aware that some data used for forecasting weather (by a program quite widely used) has had issues downloading quite significant volumes of data from the USA (NOAA data) and where the data used to be retrieved in minutes some was taking several hours  So it may be that there could be more general issues. This was not a server issue as there is a second USA site which provides the data and there were no problems at all for that site downloading the same data.

Stuart

[niemand]

Issues with transit and peering are not uncommon in the United States. They make far less use of settlement free peering and peering LANs than the UK. The country is also enormous so some areas have very few options for connectivity.

A reminder the UK would happily fit, in its entirety, into the US state of Michigan and Michigan isn't even in the top 10 states by land area.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Were those single-threaded tests?  Because I forgot to mention if I set off enough simultaneous uploads each one ends up at more or less the same speed until I saturate his end.

I've been trying to convince him to use a download manager for months so he can multi-thread downloads, but the bigger problem is me needing to send him stuff while he is busy and has just left his laptop on and doesn't involve trying to explain port forwarding and static IP addresses to him.  This was easy using the same XMPP server we use to chat (my server as the proxy), but that can't be multi-threaded for a single file.

I was certainly curious if using a VPS nearer him as a proxy might help, but it seems not (tests to a VPS in Dallas, Texas):

Code: [Select]

Reverse mode, remote host zen is sending
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   437 KBytes  3.58 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec   443 KBytes  3.63 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec   475 KBytes  3.89 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec   525 KBytes  4.30 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec   555 KBytes  4.55 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec   613 KBytes  5.02 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec   664 KBytes  5.44 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec   761 KBytes  6.23 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec   745 KBytes  6.11 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec   814 KBytes  6.67 Mbits/sec                 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  6.45 MBytes  5.41 Mbits/sec    8             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  6.02 MBytes  5.05 Mbits/sec                  receiver


Code: [Select]

Reverse mode, remote host zen6 is sending
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   161 KBytes  1.32 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec   236 KBytes  1.93 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec   313 KBytes  2.57 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec   398 KBytes  3.26 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec   488 KBytes  4.00 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec   585 KBytes  4.79 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec   573 KBytes  4.69 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec   408 KBytes  3.34 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   8.00-9.01   sec   485 KBytes  3.95 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   9.01-10.00  sec   566 KBytes  4.67 Mbits/sec                 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  4.29 MBytes  3.60 Mbits/sec    1             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  4.24 MBytes  3.56 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Code: [Select]

Reverse mode, remote host plusnet is sending
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   402 KBytes  3.29 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec   498 KBytes  4.08 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec   591 KBytes  4.84 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec   695 KBytes  5.69 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec   800 KBytes  6.56 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec   886 KBytes  7.26 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec   991 KBytes  8.12 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.08 MBytes  9.05 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.16 MBytes  9.70 Mbits/sec                 
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.25 MBytes  10.4 Mbits/sec                 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  8.57 MBytes  7.19 Mbits/sec    3             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  8.48 MBytes  7.11 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Even from my UK VPS performance is rather sporadic:

Code: [Select]

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  4.73 MBytes  39.7 Mbits/sec  283   1020 KBytes       
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  6.25 MBytes  52.4 Mbits/sec  120    532 KBytes       
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  2.50 MBytes  21.0 Mbits/sec    0    567 KBytes       
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  6.25 MBytes  52.4 Mbits/sec    0    591 KBytes       
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  3.75 MBytes  31.5 Mbits/sec   28    440 KBytes       
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  3.75 MBytes  31.5 Mbits/sec    0    472 KBytes       
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  3.75 MBytes  31.5 Mbits/sec    0    492 KBytes       
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  5.00 MBytes  41.9 Mbits/sec    0    503 KBytes       
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  5.00 MBytes  42.0 Mbits/sec    0    506 KBytes       
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  3.75 MBytes  31.5 Mbits/sec    0    506 KBytes       
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  44.7 MBytes  37.5 Mbits/sec  431             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  42.4 MBytes  35.6 Mbits/sec                  receiver