Eircom & Twitch.tv

pH

I've been with eircom for years, and I had 18 months of terrible internet on the old adsl where every evening I couldn't watch twitch or youtube, even though browsing always remained good.

I switched to efibre in June and it was great all summer - I don't get the best of rates (35Mb down) but it was consistent all day. However about 3 weeks ago it started again, every evening about 7:30 pm twitch.tv is unwatchable.

So I checked everything my end, last week I had a single PC on, with wireless disabled, and 7:30Pm on the dot twitch which had been running fine for and hour, goes from problem free to about 2 seconds of video and 10 seconds or buffering.

I can open up speedtest in a new tab and it gets 28Mb down from UK and European servers, but twitch will not stream.

I then connected openvpn to a dutch server and tried again - perfect twitch.tv for hours on end - disconnect the vpn and use it as eircom - extremely poor - not a bit of buffering now and again - just 2 seconds of video every 10 seconds.

So I'm confused, the speedtest results and being able to use openvpn seem to suggest that there is no problem in my network nor in the local exchange. yet if the problem is in eircom's data centre or back haul surely no one on eircom could use twitch of an evening and there'd be others complaining. This happens every evening at pretty much the same time 7:30 PM and goes on until about midnight - at which time I can watch twitch with no problems again.

Anyone got any ideas?

BeerWolf

Eircom are targeting you specifically to throttle twitch and youtube!

Bog Standard User

eircom dont throttle. call in you may have a line fault

red_bairn

Did you do a ping test at that time to the server?

Spear

My twitch performance has detioriated significantly and suddenly over the last few days. Are the HLS chunks being downloaded from something with ams01 in the name?

MichealKenny

Spear wrote: »

...being downloaded from something with ams01 in the name?

That's SoftLayer's naming scheme, their Amsterdam datacentre.

This is probably a peering issue, I know my speed to ams01 is always slower than my other speed tests.

http://speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com/speedtest/

Spear

MichealKenny wrote: »

That's SoftLayer's naming scheme, their Amsterdam datacentre.

This is probably a peering issue, I know my speed to ams01 is always slower than my other speed tests.

http://speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com/speedtest/

Twitch have a name convention of clustername.location.format.twitch.tv, so in this case it's video14.ams01.hls.twitch.tv. I note though that each site honours the host header of the other that I've tested, so I could be easy to point elsewhere with a hosts file. I also note that in the locations I've tested, Telia is the carrier, which makes a peering issue all the more likely.