Cable company issues
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This is not a pfSense issue, but all of you associated with this forum are probably going to be THE BEST at understanding this problem.
We have a multi-wan setup; 10Mb fiber circuit from a Verizon reseller, and a 100/20Mb line from Comcast Business. The problem is with the latter circuit.
This is not related to our network or our firewall. I experience these problems using a laptop connected directly to one of the SMC cable modem ports.
We experience long waits trying to render pages like weather.com, CNN.com or ESPN.com. Pages often take > 30 seconds to render. You can see that the browser is trying to connect to one of the many sites on each of these pages, and appears to hang. If one gets frustrated and stops the browser, then reloads it, the page will often render in under 5 seconds. Identical results on many versions of IE, Firefox and Chrome on many different PCs and laptops.
Rendering the same page from the Verizon circuit snaps open in < 2secs. We are all using the fiber circuit because the cable is so unreliable.
I have run Ookla's speed test, and all appears normal. We are close to Philadelphia, so pinging Parsippany (and other local sites) comes up @ ~15ms; Normal, IL @ 45ms; Tampa, FL @ 60ms; Redding, CA @ 110ms. Distance can account for these differences. Local site download speeds are between 85-95Mbps, upload speeds are between 12-18Mbps. All seems very normal. None of this accounts then for the long wait times.
Any idea what may be going on here? What can I do to identify the real problem and ask Comcast to fix this issue.
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Well, first I'd monitor their crappy link with Smokeping or something similar so that you have hard numbers to back up your complaint. Second, why is the onus on you? Tell them that you're not happy, you have problems X and Y, and if they don't fix it you will cancel your service.
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It's clearly a problem with opening connections rather than transfer speed. I would first suspect DNS. Are you using Comcasts DNS servers on that connection? Try using 8.8.8.8, for example. How do you have the DNS servers set in System: General:?
Maybe weather.com haven't paid Comcast to use their fast lane! ::)
Steve
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Tell Comcast you want to see something like this.
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30sec times sound more like a timeout issue. I've seen ads on sites such that blocking the IP caused the page to hang. I found that forcing the IP to something that immediately caused an error worked better than letting it timeout, because it then returned immediately.
You could attempt to watch for TCP connections that hang waiting for a syn/ack.
Just another possibility.
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Ultimately, this was a bad SMC router. It was replaced and the problems ceased. Still very weird.
Lou
