Ongoing DNS Issues? Timeouts....

[#1]

195.166.128.189

[#2]

People connected via PCL gateways should be fine right now. 
People connected to PTW or PTN gateways will see intermittent DNS performance.
Need to know which gateway you are on?  http://usertools.plus.net/@gateway

[#3]

Right, should be sorted across both sites now.  Yell if you see any further issues.

[#4]

I lost connection at 01:30, is that related to this? I was on a PTN gateway.

[#5]

It was also possible to see the impact of this on the bandwidth usage graphs.

[#6]

I concur. Much better for me now on pcl-ag01:

212.159. 13. 49 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  - Cached Name   | 0.015 | 0.017 | 0.019 | 0.001 | 100.0 |
  - Uncached Name | 0.017 | 0.106 | 0.351 | 0.091 | 100.0 |
  - DotCom Lookup | 0.018 | 0.068 | 0.131 | 0.042 | 100.0 |
  ---<O-OO---->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+

Regarding the drops, I had two. One around 2am and one around 4.30am. Looking here suggests that might have been something specific to Sheffield.

[#7]

Yep, came downstairs at 2:20 for something for my cough and noticed the Internet light was orange.
I had the two PPP drops at 2:20 and 4:29.

[#8]

The drops weren't related to the issues reported earlier in this thread, they were on the wholesale network.

[#9]

Plusnets dns shows some improvement here but things are still not as they should be.
DNS Benchmark is showing some failed lookups from a numbers of dns servers including plusnets. Level3 seems to be the worst affected, so I'm guessing packets are getting dropped somewhere.
212.159.  6. 10 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  - Cached Name  | 0.026 | 0.033 | 0.138 | 0.022 |  98.0 |
  - Uncached Name | 0.028 | 0.127 | 1.008 | 0.159 | 100.0 |
  - DotCom Lookup | 0.029 | 0.083 | 0.140 | 0.041 | 100.0 |
  ---<O-OO---->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
                    cdns02.plus.net
                  PLUSNET PlusNet PLC

  4.  2.  2.  4 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  - Cached Name  | 0.042 | 0.073 | 0.085 | 0.014 |  63.6 |
  - Uncached Name | 0.067 | 0.242 | 0.527 | 0.144 |  57.1 |
  - DotCom Lookup | 0.083 | 0.160 | 0.261 | 0.070 |  75.0 |
  ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
                d.resolvers.level3.net
              LEVEL3 Level 3 Communications

[#10]

NPR >  Hows is other traffic?  Could that be general packet loss?

[#11]

Other traffic appears fine.
I'm running my own DNS resolver and that's also fine.
Off out now, I'll do some more testing later.
DNS Benchmark from this morning:

[#12]

I still have some elevation on plusnet, but a big improvement on yesterday. As npr has stated i'm still seeing loss on level 3.
[tt]Nameserver          Response Time (ms)
                      min/avg/max/stdev/retries
212.159.6.9        18.21/19.90/22.28/1.55/0
212.159.6.10        18.45/20.08/22.48/1.62/0
208.67.222.222      17.77/18.20/18.42/0.23/0
208.67.222.220      17.59/18.13/18.39/0.28/0
208.67.222.123      18.16/18.29/18.57/0.15/0
208.67.220.123      18.17/18.41/18.81/0.22/0
8.8.8.8            23.79/23.95/24.14/0.13/0
8.8.4.4            17.49/17.84/18.22/0.24/0
209.244.0.3        17.95/18.21/18.43/0.19/0
209.244.0.4        33.66/73.50/73.47/23.78/3
192.168.0.254      19.21/19.65/19.99/0.28/0
192.168.0.15        0.55/0.56/0.56/0.00/0[/tt]

[#13]

I'm still having problems today, and have been since Tuesday. Still getting DNS failures, SSL errors, and timeouts when trying to connect to Google, Facebook, and several other sites.

[#14]

Have you tried changing to  opendns ?

[#15]

I had initially worked around the problem (yesterday morning) by switching to Google's name servers. However, sometime in the last 24 hours, my Edimax router seems to have overridden this and set one of PlusNet's name servers as the primary, and relegated Google to the secondary. I have just changed again, to OpenDNS this time, and it seems to have solved the problems for now.
I will investigate the configuration options on the router to see if I can make my manual override a bit more sticky. You'd think that "Use user discovered DNS server only" would do what it says on the tin, but apparently not...