I seem to be suffering from a lot of web page timeouts at the moment.
I navigate around a site for a while and then I can access no more pages at that site, if I leave the browser tab waiting I eventually get a timeout error. Usually if I then retry the page appears instantly.
Can anyone suggest what might be going on and/or any way to diagnose what the problem is? Just being able to work out whether it's something wrong at my end or if there really is something wrong with the site I'm accessing would be useful.
On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 16:08 +0000, Chris G wrote:
I seem to be suffering from a lot of web page timeouts at the moment.
I navigate around a site for a while and then I can access no more pages at that site, if I leave the browser tab waiting I eventually get a timeout error. Usually if I then retry the page appears instantly.
Can anyone suggest what might be going on and/or any way to diagnose what the problem is? Just being able to work out whether it's something wrong at my end or if there really is something wrong with the site I'm accessing would be useful.
To see if it is my end of their I usually try loading a different page in a different window. If that works while the original page does not then the problem must be their server or something else beyond my DSL line.
I have been having some unloadable pages recently but this is because my Router/Wireless Access Point should act as a DNS proxy but has been forgetting the ISP's DNS servers. Hopefully a software upgrade may have fixed that.
Regards, Steve.
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:48:37PM +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 16:08 +0000, Chris G wrote:
I seem to be suffering from a lot of web page timeouts at the moment.
I navigate around a site for a while and then I can access no more pages at that site, if I leave the browser tab waiting I eventually get a timeout error. Usually if I then retry the page appears instantly.
Can anyone suggest what might be going on and/or any way to diagnose what the problem is? Just being able to work out whether it's something wrong at my end or if there really is something wrong with the site I'm accessing would be useful.
To see if it is my end of their I usually try loading a different page in a different window. If that works while the original page does not then the problem must be their server or something else beyond my DSL line.
Yes, generally that's what I would do - and if other pages load OK I would assume the problem is their end. However this seems to to happening to me so much at present I'm wondering if there is some more subtle error. As I said it's rarely the first few pages I load from a particular site, it's after I have loaded five or six pages that it sticks.
I do have two ADSL routers with my Draytek Vigor 2820n doing the bandwidth sharing with the 'secondary' one which is a BT Business Hub (2Wire router). I'm wondering if there is some subtle problem when my connection changes from one router (and thus IP address) to the other. I already have various rules to force SMTP connections and HTTPS connections to use only one router. Maybe the sites in question are doing something which requires the connection to appear to come from the same IP all the time.
On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:03:53 +0000 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
I do have two ADSL routers with my Draytek Vigor 2820n doing the bandwidth sharing with the 'secondary' one which is a BT Business Hub (2Wire router). I'm wondering if there is some subtle problem when my connection changes from one router (and thus IP address) to the other. I already have various rules to force SMTP connections and HTTPS connections to use only one router. Maybe the sites in question are doing something which requires the connection to appear to come from the same IP all the time.
Some websites which attempt to maintain state with session ids will see a change of IP address within a session as a potential hijack and will then drop the session - but you should get an error message along the lines of "your session could not be verified".
I have no idea whether this is what is happening in you case though.
Mick
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On 11 Feb 21:16, mbm wrote:
On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:03:53 +0000 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
I do have two ADSL routers with my Draytek Vigor 2820n doing the bandwidth sharing with the 'secondary' one which is a BT Business Hub (2Wire router). I'm wondering if there is some subtle problem when my connection changes from one router (and thus IP address) to the other. I already have various rules to force SMTP connections and HTTPS connections to use only one router. Maybe the sites in question are doing something which requires the connection to appear to come from the same IP all the time.
Some websites which attempt to maintain state with session ids will see a change of IP address within a session as a potential hijack and will then drop the session - but you should get an error message along the lines of "your session could not be verified".
That really shouldn't happen, with the likes of AOL throwing people through transparent proxies, and thus subsequent requests (certainly having the potential of) coming from different IPs. Most session ids are just cookies, and so shouldn't have that issue at all, they'll still be supplied to the host site.
Even if that were the case, I wouldn't expect the site to hang, just throw back a page saying "sod off" or similar.
Cheers,
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 04:08:23PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
Can anyone suggest what might be going on and/or any way to diagnose what the problem is? Just being able to work out whether it's something wrong at my end or if there really is something wrong with the site I'm accessing would be useful.
I wouldn't even want to try to guess, as IIRC you have some slightly weird setup with 2 adsl lines. Have you tried traceroute to the sites in question when they go wrong? is DNS working? can you get to other sites ok when a site fails?
There really are too many variables and not enough information you've given to suggest anything more than that.
Adam
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:47:02PM +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 04:08:23PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
Can anyone suggest what might be going on and/or any way to diagnose what the problem is? Just being able to work out whether it's something wrong at my end or if there really is something wrong with the site I'm accessing would be useful.
I wouldn't even want to try to guess, as IIRC you have some slightly weird setup with 2 adsl lines. Have you tried traceroute to the sites in question when they go wrong? is DNS working? can you get to other sites ok when a site fails?
Yes, you're right, I do have 2 lines (see my other reply). I did try a traceroute but it didn't seem to tell me anything very useful, maybe I'll try it again when it happens again and look a little harder. When it happens everything else continues to work perfectly and I can quite happily continue my searches on other sites in other tabs. I'm hunting around various French tourist looking for accomodation when this is happening so I often have five or six tabs each drilling down through a different site looking at descriptions of gîtes etc.
There really are too many variables and not enough information you've given to suggest anything more than that.
I wasn't expecting an answer, just ideas to poke around with, your suggestion of traceroute is one such and, as I said, I'll dig further with that if it happens again.
I might 'un load balance' my routers and see if that seems to stop it happening, it's easy enough to simply turn off the second router and tell the 2820n it's not there.
Chris G wrote:
I wasn't expecting an answer, just ideas to poke around with, your suggestion of traceroute is one such and, as I said, I'll dig further with that if it happens again.
Some other ideas:
Do things improve after a router restart? I've found that sometimes they get clogged up with too much traffic and get confused (I'd guess something to do with how they handle NAT but that would just be a guess). If restarting the router helps, look for firmware upgrades or a new router.
Do things get particularly bad in bad weather (rain/snow)? If your router shows you ADSL errors, check them and see if they're a problem for you. We find that our line isn't great when the weather is bad.
Is Google always instant? (Not iGoogle, if you use it.) Maybe you have an issue of MTU settings; sites like Google only send data in small packets that seem to always be instant but other sites with substantial content will get bogged down by fragmented packets. Try pinging sites with large packets (after confirming they respond to a normal ping). Eg: ping www.google.co.uk -s 1472 .. should work if your MTU is 1500 (ifconfig will tell you). Change -s to -l if you're testing in Windows (l for size? Yeah, Windows is easier than Linux!) For that matter, if you can test in Windows I'd recommend doing that to see where the problem lies. You can change your MTU temporarily for testing: sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1000 .. assuming eth0 is your ethernet port. You should get responses for packets anything up to 28byes less than MTU. If your MTU is too high, the packet will get fragmented by something between you and the site and is likely to cause problems.
On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 10:40 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Do things get particularly bad in bad weather (rain/snow)? If your router shows you ADSL errors, check them and see if they're a problem for you. We find that our line isn't great when the weather is bad.
That should not happen but, of course, it does due to water getting into joints in the line.
You could report it as an ADSL fault. If you find it makes the phone noisy you could also try reporting it as a phone fault.
Regards, Steve,
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:59:44AM +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 10:40 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Do things get particularly bad in bad weather (rain/snow)? If your router shows you ADSL errors, check them and see if they're a problem for you. We find that our line isn't great when the weather is bad.
That should not happen but, of course, it does due to water getting into joints in the line.
You could report it as an ADSL fault. If you find it makes the phone noisy you could also try reporting it as a phone fault.
It's unlikely to affect just one web site though! The fault is that I get timeouts on a particular web site after paging through several pages there, other sites are still perfectly OK.
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Adam Bower -
Brett Parker -
Chris G -
Mark Rogers -
mbm -
Steve Fosdick