Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark Topic as New
- Mark Topic as Read
- Float this Topic for Current User
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Printer Friendly Page
- Plusnet Community
- :
- Forum
- :
- Help with my Plusnet services
- :
- Broadband
- :
- Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 12:20 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Got 80/20 FTTC service a few weeks ago and it's working really well - absolutely worth the money and trouble. Nearly 70MBps downlink speed as shown by speedtest.net, with much less variation over the day than I used to have with ADSL2.
However, I'm confused about the upload speed on my WinXP desktop workhorse box. I see only about 10.5Mbps up, whereas other machines on my LAN (one Win7, one Ubuntu 12.04) get around 16Mbps uplink. This is pretty reliable and consistent, with minimal variation from test to test.
Things I've already eliminated:
- It's nothing to do with wireless. I don't use WiFi for my main machines. They're on wired gigabit Ethernet.
- It's not the machine's CPU horsepower or its Ethernet interface, because I can push data around my home LAN at nearly the full Gigabit rate.
- It's not my router, because all machines on the LAN go through the same port of the same router (I have a GbE switch on my side of the router, so only one of the router's LAN ports is in use).
- It's not the specific browser. Chrome, Firefox and IE all behave similarly.
- There is no other significant network traffic at the time I run the test.
Any ideas? Anyone seen this, know of weirdo registry settings that might affect it, etc?
thanks in advance
Jonathan
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 2:56 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 3:10 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
The machine is used all day every day, so I think I would have noticed if the port or network switch were flaky or intermittent.
Thanks for the suggestion anyway.
Jonathan
dick:quote
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 3:14 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 4:45 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Quote from: Anotherone Try http://community.plus.net/library/settings/guide-to-rwin-mtu/
Looked very interesting, and the checker reported uplink MTU smaller than necessary, but after setting path MTU discovery ON and rebooting, nothing has changed significantly. The setting really did take effect - I looked in the registry (bleaurgh) and indeed, in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters I find EnablePMTUDiscovery=1. Unfortunately I didn't check what its value was before I tried the change-and-reboot.
Ah well, never mind. 10Mbps is a lot better than nothing, and in due course I'll probably move over to a Linux box for any internet-facing stuff that needs high upload speeds.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Jonathan
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 4:49 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 5:17 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 5:41 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Quote from: Oldjim disable the firewall/anti virus
Whoa, thanks Oldjim. That's it.
Windows Firewall seems to make a small difference - around 0.5Mbps in each direction, but that could be just random fluctuations in the speed test.
The antivirus, though (Trend Micro) is really clobbering my uplink! No significant impact on downlink, but uplink goes from 10.5Mbps with antivirus active,
to 16.5Mbps when the AV is disabled!
Looks like a support ticket to Trend Micro (or, maybe, a faster machine)... and thanks to Oldjim and Anotherone for their input.
Jonathan
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
04-03-2013 5:56 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
05-03-2013 6:09 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
- Trend Micro responded reasonably promptly, but with a completely incomprehensible boiler-plate response clearly aimed at their internal staff rather than customers, including a zip archive of stuff I was supposed to use, but no password to decrypt said archive. Oops.
- I complained, got a quick and courteous response with a suggestion to upgrade to a more recent version of the AV tool (not the virus patterns, which were already up to date).
- With the new version installed, I got the same slowdown in uplink speed even with AV disabled - I had to uninstall it to get the BB performance back to normal.
- They also asked me to use their diagnostic tool to capture information while runing a test. It slowed my BB connection to a crawl, so I don't believe it can be collecting usefully representative information. Worse, it generated 12MB of opaque log data which I choose not to send to Trend Micro - I just don't know what I'm sending.
So... out with that AV, install Avira's free product which seems to get good writeups, and everything is hunky-dory again with no measurable loss of BB speed due to the AV.
Thanks for the encouragement and guidance. Now I can sign up for the ISPA trial with confidence!
Jonathan
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
06-03-2013 12:47 AM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
06-03-2013 3:12 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
</2p>
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
06-03-2013 3:57 PM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
Re: Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?
07-03-2013 9:35 AM
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Highlight
- Report to Moderator
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark Topic as New
- Mark Topic as Read
- Float this Topic for Current User
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Printer Friendly Page
- Plusnet Community
- :
- Forum
- :
- Help with my Plusnet services
- :
- Broadband
- :
- Upload speed limited on WinXP machine?