Congestion issues starting again on Eir?

Hank Scorpio

Last couple of nights when I went to play a game online I noticed all the servers I usually play on now have 2 and 3x the ping than usual. Below is a speedtest to Frankfurt



Same speed test to Digiweb



And a speed test to Eir's server



I'm on the 40/10 vdsl profile and for the most part it's been fine up until the last few days.

Hank Scorpio

From what I can tell inex seems congested again or has a problem with it's peering.

Tracing route to rte.ie [104.16.42.72]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 11 ms 8 ms 11 ms 51-171-48-1-dynamic.agg3.kny.prp-wtd.eircom.net [51.171.48.1]
3 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms lag-38.pe1.wtd.prp-wtd.eircom.net [86.43.11.184]
4 * 8 ms 8 ms lag-3.core2.prp.core.eircom.net [86.43.253.96]
5 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms lag-100.coreb.prp.core.eircom.net [86.43.9.74]
6 * 9 ms 9 ms lag-21-br1-6cr-coreb-prp.br1.6cr.border.eircom.net [86.43.9.222]
7 26 ms 27 ms 27 ms inex1.as13335.net [185.6.36.76]
8 22 ms 22 ms 23 ms 104.16.42.72

Hank Scorpio

I've made a thread on the Eir support forum. This is pretty annoying, not only are speeds at 15% or less during peak hours, but ping times double too.

ED E

8Mb at 50ms to Germany is pretty acceptable. Dunno what you're expecting.

loyatemu

FWIW I'm on Virgin and getting 12ms ping to Dublin and 33ms to Frankfurt. So an extra 20ms to Frankfurt is probably about right, the baseline latency within Ireland will depend on your broadband product.

Gonzo

I only have ADSL but get a ping of 59 to Frankfort so 50 with Fiber isn't that bad.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/5922445003.png

Hank Scorpio

Not trying to be smart, but are you guys missing the point? Here's Frankfurt at non peak hours.



At peak hours download speeds to countries like Germany and France crawl. This has only started happening the last week. Before that at any time of the day the DL speeds and ping times were always full speed.

My point isn't 50ms being bad, it's that at non peak hours it's 30 and that the DL speed drops to 10% of what it is during non peak hours. It's the same thing that started happening around 2 years ago on Eir and took them a year to fix.

TLDR. Pings and DL speeds fluctuate greatly during peak hours, that is network congestion.

ED E

Its not them that fix it. When it happens its usually due to one of three companies having issues. For example 3(?) years ago there was a subsea fibre break but that means requesting a cabling fleet (only a couple in the world) and waiting for them to be available and then sail to us. Its a slow process.

Hank Scorpio

ED E wrote: »

Its not them that fix it. When it happens its usually due to one of three companies having issues. For example 3(?) years ago there was a subsea fibre break but that means requesting a cabling fleet (only a couple in the world) and waiting for them to be available and then sail to us. Its a slow process.

It's their fault for letting stuff like this happen in the first place, granted there may be other factors at play this time around and the issue might resolve itself (doubtful from my exp of eircom), but last time it happened they proved themselves to be completely incompetent in dealing with the issues. It wasn't the undersea cable, even after it was "repaired" the issues persisted for almost a year. They oversubscribed their service and couldn't handle the traffic.

Why say it's acceptable for 8Mb and 50ms to Germany when at non peak hours it's 40Mb and 30ms? It's not. Look at the speed test to Paris during peak hours, it's under 2Mb.

Hank Scorpio

Also I just want to say I don't mean to talk aggressively towards anyone on this thread, it's not my intention. I've gone through these congestion problems for years with Eircom and to see it happening again on efiber really annoys me after I thought I finally had a congestion free and reliable service. 4K streaming is no longer possible at peak hours as it constantly buffers.

Cuddlesworth

Hank Scorpio wrote: »

Also I just want to say I don't mean to talk aggressively towards anyone on this thread, it's not my intention. I've gone through these congestion problems for years with Eircom and to see it happening again on efiber really annoys me after I thought I finally had a congestion free and reliable service. 4K streaming is no longer possible at peak hours as it constantly buffers.

You seem to have this idea that Eircom has complete control and visibility of the traffic from you to your destination. They don't.

15 ms increase during peak periods is something that will not warrant any investigation from any of the multiple L2 providers between you and Germany.

Hank Scorpio

That's to Eircoms own speedtest server, speeds continue to drop during peak hours. Non peak it's the full 40/10.

digiman

What cab are you connected to?

Hank Scorpio

Sent you a msg there. It's not local congestion, the majority of routes appear congested at peak hours. Some routes I still receive the full speed as I would at non peak hours.

digiman

Hank Scorpio wrote: »

Sent you a msg there. It's not local congestion, the majority of routes appear congested at peak hours. Some routes I still receive the full speed as I would at non peak hours.

What routes are not congested? How does their path differ from the ones that are congested?

Hank Scorpio

digiman wrote: »

What routes are not congested? How does their path differ from the ones that are congested?

I don't know what's wrong. The traffic to Germany/NL used to be routed through London but now the final hop out of Ireland goes straight to Germany.

Both screenshots are to Vodafone.de





Two of the servers I rent in Germany crawl at peak hours. Pings to a lot of European servers go 4x at peak hours, not just Germany, but NL, France and so on. Something is wrong, perhaps it's out of Eircoms control.

loyatemu

Hank Scorpio wrote: »

Something is wrong, perhaps it's out of Eircoms control.

if speeds to their own test server are dropping then it's something that is under their control, whether it's contention on your local cab or something further into the network.

Hank Scorpio

Youtube 1080p is buffering at peak time now. It's auto switching down to 480p

https://vid.me/oibS

Is nobody else experiencing this?

This is how it always starts out with Eircom, it will keep slowly deteriorating.

dalta5billion

Hank Scorpio wrote: »

Youtube 1080p is buffering at peak time now. It's auto switching down to 480p

https://vid.me/oibS

Is nobody else experiencing this?

This is how it always starts out with Eircom, it will keep slowly deteriorating.

I am with Eir and can stream 4K YouTube no problems. Which is weird because back in the Eircom congestion thread a year or so ago, I was getting terrible download speeds from the HEAnet FTP mirror while another Eircom customer was able to prove that they were getting full speeds.

I am inclined to believe (and I'm completely guessing here, cos I'm not a network engineer) that Eir have some misconfigured QoS policies across their international network that result in certain chunks of customers getting screwed more than others whenever any particular peering gets saturated at peak times.

The problem only appears when their peerings get saturated and the QoS starts playing a factor in deciding what packets get dropped. I think what is happening is a certain class of Eir customer is getting put on the lowest class of QoS, I.e. dropping more packets than normal customers.

ED E

Your problem is within the Eir network. Post your line stats captured *after* 9PM.

Hank Scorpio

ED E wrote: »

Your problem is within the Eir network. Post your line stats captured *after* 9PM.

Eircoms speed test server

ED E

That confirms it an issue on their border alright.

Either there's a severe alarm on the wall of monitors in Citywest and its outside their control OR its isolated and nobodys noticed.



Options:
A) Change provider
Wait and hope

You'll never get past L2 and thus never get any real answers.

Hank Scorpio

VPN will have to do for now.

Some speedtest servers are fine.



Very strange.

You can even notice it on sites like reddit, the images take an age to load, 56k style.

Hank Scorpio

dalta5billion wrote: »

I am with Eir and can stream 4K YouTube no problems.

Would you mind pinging utzone.de after 8.30pm or so and posting the trace if you get the chance, I'd appreciate it.

dalta5billion

Yeah it's almost definitely their peering at DE-CIX. I'm getting 56 KiloBytes/second from Hetzner and a few other Frankfurt peers via DE-CIX. Funny because they appear to have 30 Gbps worth of ports at both DE-CIX and AMS-IX and AMS-IX seems to be holding up pretty well.

So far DE-CIX seems to be the only affected route, London as you posted above is holding up well.

traceroute to utzone.de (148.251.137.83), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  gateway (192.168.1.254)  1.019 ms  1.013 ms  1.301 ms
 2  [my ip] (my ip)  13.250 ms  14.267 ms  20.223 ms
 3  lag-31.pe2.prp.prp-wtd.eircom.net (86.43.11.49)  6.920 ms  7.358 ms  7.372 ms
 4  * * *
 5  lag-100.corea.dbn.core.eircom.net (86.43.9.68)  8.667 ms  8.684 ms  9.053 ms
 6  lag-2-corea-bdt-corea-dbn.corea.bdt.core.eircom.net (86.43.9.80)  10.102 ms  8.968 ms  8.921 ms
 7  lag-51-br1-csg-corea-bdt.br1.csg.border.eircom.net (86.43.9.210)  9.229 ms  7.208 ms  6.785 ms
 8  decix-gw.hetzner.de (80.81.192.164)  55.768 ms  55.465 ms  55.435 ms
 9  core24.hetzner.de (213.239.229.78)  59.476 ms  59.357 ms core23.hetzner.de (213.239.203.154)  53.996 ms
10  ex9k1.rz21.hetzner.de (213.239.203.174)  59.340 ms  59.592 ms  56.099 ms
11  mail.despe.de (148.251.137.83)  52.483 ms  52.476 ms  52.461 ms

As you can see that server is with Hetzner too

Hank Scorpio

Aye my trace is identical and I get the similar extremely low speeds that keep dropping down the longer the download goes.

It's weird all the traffic out of Dublin to NL/DE/FR bypasses the UK entirely, now the traffic routes directly to whatever destination.

It never used to be like that from what I remember, it would route through London first and then onto the next node.