Getting a delay with my internet (however my speed and ping are normal)

Question

I've been having some delay issues with my internet connection. It's hard to explain exactly what the issue is, but I can give a few examples. Also it does this with or without my router connected.

-If I try to go to any website, my browser will sit with the loading wheel seemingly doing nothing for about 10-30sec, then the page loads at full speed.

-If I go to YouTube, after about 10-30sec of staring at a white screen, everything except the video previews load, there still white squares (but they do eventually load). Then when I go to play a video, it takes between, 10-30sec for the video to start, but once it starts it almost immediately buffers all the way through at full speed. BUT, yep there's more, about 10-20sec after the video starts it gets paused so the commercial can play...the commercial that should have played before the video ever started.

I have 20Mb/s Down, and 2Mb/s Up, during the day I actually get closer to 30Mb/s Down and 1.7Mb/s Up, then in the evening I get about 18Mb/s Down, and 1.5Mb/s Up.

The only reason my ping test is a B is because It cant test packet loss because I don't have java, I ran the ping test on a Windows computer on the same network, and it was an A and packet loss was at 0%.

Also

    ping -c 4 google.com
PING google.com (74.125.45.105) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from yx-in-f105.1e100.net (74.125.45.105): icmp_req=1 ttl=51 time=33.3 ms
64 bytes from yx-in-f105.1e100.net (74.125.45.105): icmp_req=2 ttl=51 time=27.5 ms
64 bytes from yx-in-f105.1e100.net (74.125.45.105): icmp_req=3 ttl=51 time=29.1 ms
64 bytes from yx-in-f105.1e100.net (74.125.45.105): icmp_req=4 ttl=51 time=29.4 ms

--- google.com ping statistics --- 
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 27.563/29.873/33.335/2.127 ms

Also, here is a link to a Kubuntu user with what sounds like the exact same issue, unfortunately the work around mentioned in the tread didn't really help me.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3106289.0

INFO: Ubuntu 11.10 64bit ASRock M3A770DE mobo W/Realtek RTL8111DL on board NIC

Answer 1

Ok, I believe I solved the issue. A few days ago in an attempt to fix sharing issues with samba I modified the file /etc/nsswitch.conf I added wins before dns on the line that normally reads hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 so now my internet seems to be back to normal speed, even though when I ping for example askubuntu.com it still takes 3000ms round trip.

And of course removing wins from the file made my samba shares break again.

Answer 2

I found a fix for the 6-10 second or longer delay before Chrome even tries to start connecting to the internet.

In the Chrome Browser go to the pull-down menu and go to 'Settings'. Open 'Show Advanced Settings' at the bottom of the page. Go almost to the bottom of this page to the'System' section and un-check the box and turn off 'Use Hardware Acceleration When Available'.

Hope this works for you too.

Answer 3

This could be a problem with your nameservers, specifically that the first one or 2 in the list are timing out and your computer is only getting responses once it goes to the backups. To check what those are set to, run the command in a terminal:

cat /etc/resolv.conf

that should output something like:

# Generated by NetworkManager
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.5

With actual IP addresses. You can try pinging each of those nameservers in order to see if they are all responding, and run some sample domain name lookups against them. The following command will look up the IP address of google.com by asking the DNS server at 1.2.3.4:

host www.google.com 1.2.3.4

If any of the DNS servers don't respond or take a long time to respond, you know they are they ones to remove from the list.

A temporary fix is probably to remove the first item in the list and see if things improve.

A permanent fix would be to change the settings in your router to deliver only the working DNS server IPs when you connect your computer to the network by DHCP.