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[freeformschooler]

The website loads really poorly/inconsistently for me, so it may be an issue of slow internet speed making it outright time out? This is really more weird's field.

[wierd]

It looks like the packet DOES get outside Comcrap's network, but that 73ms hop is really dirty.

However, the real culprit appears to be NetworkLayer.com's network.

My guess is that they are oversubscribed, and that packets are going undelivered because of congestion. A simple test is in order-- Attempt to load the page using a public proxy server. (There are jillions on the internet. A normal HTTP proxy website like anonymizer.com should suffice. Note that this isnt an endorsement for that site-- just that such sites exist.) That will change the route that the packets travel, so that the proxy does the talking for you, and should get around the jammed up traffic snarl between Comcrap and NetworkLayer.

[Dermonster]

I've been using proxies. They do work.

I've also been having trouble with deviantart, let me put up that route.

[wierd]

The congestion there is WAY downstream, and is probably more indicative of DA's host segment being a little busy. The packets ARE reaching the destination though, and not timing out mid-transport. (Hey, you would be busy too, if you had jillions of teenagers posting crayon pictures all day. )

I do again see a very slow response time on that 3rd/4th hop inside Comcast.  Looks like that is still local to your area. (Minnesota?) I suspect local congestion from over subscription, coupled with traffic shaping.

I'd test that hypothesis by running traceroutes at various times of the day to the same remote hosts, and measuring the differences in delivery time.

[Dermonster]

It's more that the site only kind of half loads at any given moment. I see a bunch of pictures linked from over there on a regular bases (Embedded in a forum thread) and three fourths of the time they just don't load. WHen I view them myself the site just turns up with the background pure white, everything seems to be shoved off to the left in a column and pictures don't load.


Anyway, is there anything I can actually do about any of this? This is my uncles place so I have no control of where he buys what from a utilities standpoint.

[wierd]

Not really.  It's an issue with an abusive ISP, and lunkhead net admins upstream. You cant fix stupid.

[Dermonster]

Well, do you know anything about why all of the anything that can access a webpage stops working occasionally until I reset the router? (Occasionally meaning at least once a day and upwards)

[wierd]

Routers talk to each other using a protocol called ARP. (Stands for Address Resolution Protocol) It's basically a series of messages saying "I can see these networks!" so that routers can determine which other routers to send packets through.

If your router is indeed a box of rocks, it could be having difficulties with the ARP messages it is getting from the next hop up.

[Dermonster]

The thing is, things like WoW or Chivalry or Team Fortress 2 work perfectly fine during the period where the browsers stop loading things.

Steam chat works too, even though it's store doesn't.

[wierd]

That's because those routes havent changed.

If a route gets too congested, it sends messages downstream telling routers to stop sending it data, because it cant deliver messages. This is how the internet  "Routes around damage" (Tim Berners Lee, one of the fathers of the modern internet, has famously asserted that attempts at internet censorship by totalitarian regimes, and efforts like traffic shaping, will ultimately trigger this mechanism, and the internet will simply route around the "Damage".) If it does not receive messages from the upstream host for acknowledgement (ACK), it also triggers this mechanism, and the route gets pruned. This is how the internet deals with things like severed undersea cables, or with cities getting blown up, like in the middle east. This happens automatically without any net admin's intervention.

Because the network is dynamically reconfiguring, and choosing outbound routes based on availability and router-to-router communications, the routes can and do change spurriously based on use, as long as a less congested or higher availability route is available. If you have a shittily overcrowded link between your ISP and one of it's peered networks, then the currently favored route for a given destination could constantly be changing, which can be confusing to your crappy home-grade router.

I have similar problems with the DSL modem I am forced to use. Thing's horrible. Needs rebooting at least once a month. Total trash.

[freeformschooler]

Wow, fascinating. Thanks for your answers, weird.

[Dermonster]

Interesting. Kinda useless, even though there's not really any 'useful' things to say, but interesting.

[wierd]

Knowledge is power.

Sadly, now you know why IT morons like me are constantly screaming about how ISPs and other network operators need to get their shit together, stop raising prices and overscubscribing 20 year old fiber links, stop giving CEOs disgustingly filthy obscene pay raises, and *Gasp*, ACTUALLY UPDATE THE PHYSICAL LINKS in their networks.

But, it's so much easier to just tell users that they are being greedy, and to hike up the prices, and to introduce bastard practices like traffic shaping, than to--- you know-- ACTUALLY FIX SHIT.

Because doing the latter costs money, and makes stock holders cry in their cheerios at the stockholder's meetings, because those idiots dont know the first thing about what makes a network actually carry data.

[Dermonster]

It appears to have fixed itself.

[nenjin]

It appears to have fixed itself.

I didn't want to say that since you seemed dead set that we could solve this for you.....but 90% of web access issues aren't something anyone but the owners can do something about.