Slow page loading times

[mickporter]

I'm logging on at work at present cause my sky is soooo slow... it appears worse after 5pm which is understandable but has gradually worstened over this last week.

My other problems stem from upgrading to Vista!! I know stupid in itself. For some reason Vista does not find my LAN without much rebooting of the router and fiddling around with network repairs etc.....

Has anyone else had and solved this problem? Or am I unique?? I wondered if the slowdown and my connection problems may be the same?

Address is 90.197.172.***

[BrigadierA]

I'm having real problems tonight. I've been fine up till now, but tonight I cannot get to Amazon.co.uk: low prices in Electronics, Books, Music, DVDs & more or The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) which I'm sure both haven't gone down.

Address: 90.197.248.xxx

Edit:
Okay, just after I posted this Amazon seems to be appearing now (after a router turn off/turn on), but still can't get IMDB.

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4672 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 46.0 db 28.0 db
Noise Margin 6.3 db 23.0 db

[Hughjarse]

Ok Ive flicked thru this thread and I believe its been hijacked a few times and gone off topic and so youre getting mixed views.

I would definitley try changning your DNS servers and Im willing to guess it will help an awful lot of these problems.

Skys DNS servers seem to be hitty miss so try changing them to opendns and see what you get.

You will find out how to do this by searching this forum.

[BrigadierA]

Thanks Hughjarse,

It seemed to pick up okay an hour or so later and has been okay since, so hopefully was just a Sky glitch. I'll definitely keep the OpenDNS in mind though if it happens again.

[belial]

mainly after 5pm, sunday nights are really bad for us?
90.192.87.xxx

[sony007]

Hi Hughjarse,

This is one problem i'd like to see the back off but unfortunately I do not know how to change the dns thing you mentioned. I did try a quick search on here. Since i've had sky BB installed this is by far the worst period of my BB experiece I have every encounted. In saying that if it's something I can sort out at my end then I take that all back but boy have I tried with TIER 3 or what. I'm talking like 10min to load pages or not load at all in many cases. What have to do every 10 to 15 min is stick the pen tip in the hole at the back of the sky router to reset, wait 4 min andthe all is ok for 10min in some cases sometimes i'm lucky and it will work for 40min without much of a drastic problem, it's there mind but not drastic. Im running IE 7 and I uninstalled this to go back to IE 6 to see if that would prevent the major hanging. Well with IE 6 install I was unable to view my favorites or browse the net properly so I had to reinstall IE 7 again. I've given up now with calling sky BB as I got the shakes with the thought of talking to someone who would just want to take my details for someone to get back to me. At the moment i'm on my m8s 4megs telewest typing this and I feel like i've just come of dial-up with how quick i'm browsing the net and this forum. So any help would be well appreciated.

[h8ball]

@sony007

The default Sky Broadband setup has Windows TCP/IP Properties configured as follows:-

Preferred DNS Server = 192.168.0.1
Alternate DNS Server = (NONE)

This uses the Sky Router (192.168.0.1) as a DNS Proxy Server. Windows sends ALL DNS Lookup requests to the Sky Router, which then forwards them to one of Sky's DNS Servers. If you look at the Sky Router's Status Page, you'll see a "Domain Name Server" IP address. This is the Sky DNS Server your Sky Router was told to use when it logged in to Sky.

Unfortunately, THAT'S where the problem lies. Sky's DNS Servers are typically overloaded, presumably due to Sky taking on MORE Sky Broadband customers FASTER then they can upgrade their systems to cope with the increased load. The result is HIGH user "contention" for limited network resources. Since the most common ISP request is a DNS Lookup, it's the Sky DNS Servers that suffer most, giving slow DNS responses and, in extreme cases, DNS timeouts (web sites then fail to respond).

It also doesn't help that Sky don't appear to give us the DNS "redundancy" that's the de facto standard with almost every other ISP. The Sky Router is configured with ONE DNS Server IP address rather than the usual TWO. Normally, your ISP gives you a Primary DNS and a Secondary DNS. DNS Lookup requests are always sent to the Primary DNS first. IF it times out (server down or, in rare cases, too busy), the request is then REsent to the Secondary DNS. Since it's HIGHLY unlikely that BOTH DNS Servers will be down or busy at the same time, you're guaranteed a successful DNS response! Unfortunately, Sky's HIGH contention coupled with NO DNS redundancy means that there's NO way for your PC to automatically recover from a DNS timeout, and YOU see the effect of this in the form of web sites FAILING to respond!

Although the Sky Router only shows ONE Sky DNS Server (Domain Name Server), I've found that Sky, like other ISP's, DOES use TWO DNS Servers. So why does the Sky Router ONLY use ONE of them? In my area (North Tyneside), the two Sky DNS Servers are:-

Primary DNS = 87.86.189.16 (cns1.sky.com)
Secondary DNS = 87.86.189.17 (cns2.sky.com)

You can BYPASS "using the Sky Router as a DNS Proxy Server" by entering these DIRECTLY into TCP/IP Properties:-

Preferred DNS Server = 87.86.189.16 (cns1.sky.com)
Alternate DNS Server = 87.86.189.17 (cns2.sky.com)

In my case, this gave me the redundancy of having cns2.sky.com as my Alternate DNS Server, which reduced my DNS timeouts. Well, somewhat...

It doesn't help if BOTH Sky DNS Servers are overloaded, though. I wasn't satisfied with the performance of DNS Lookups, so I set my Software Firewall (Kerio) to monitor ALL outgoing DNS Lookup requests on port 53. My log results showed an alarming tendency, during peak times, for cns1.sky.com to time out almost 100% of the time, causing requests to be resent to cns2.sky.com, which would occasionally time out AS WELL! In other words, BOTH DNS Lookups were FAILING, causing web sites to FAIL to respond!

This goes to show JUST HOW BADLY Sky's DNS servers are overloaded. A Secondary DNS server is intended to be a BACKUP which is ONLY used when the Primary DNS server is down or (under rare conditions) TOO busy to respond in a timely manner. The Primary DNS should NEVER be SO overloaded for SO long that almost EVERY request ends up being resent to the Secondary DNS, causing IT to overload!

As a result, I've taken the advice of this forum and switched to using the OpenDNS free public DNS servers:-

Preferred DNS Server = 208.67.222.222 (resolver1.opendns.com)
Alternate DNS Server = 208.67.222.220 (resolver2.opendns.com)

Again, this BYPASSES "using the Sky Router as a DNS Proxy Server" and has the benefit of DNS redundancy. OpenDNS also has the following major benefits:-

1. Distributed network of dedicated DNS servers, which guarantees a FAST response!

2. Anti-phishing warnings as standard!

3. Automatically corrects common spelling mistakes in domain names, so mistyping a domain name won't redirect you to a malicious "trap" site whose domain name is a deliberate typo!

I've been using OpenDNS for several days now, and have seen ZERO DNS timeouts or problems! A 100% improvement over the multiple timeouts per hour I was experiencing when using Sky's "flaky" DNS Servers!

All hail OpenDNS!

[Hughjarse]

Which is a very accurate description ( although I now have a feeling by your last post that it may not be this as its degradtion which sounds like a noise build up. )

To change your dns .. You have absolutley nothing to lose and can change them back if it dosent work


Double click your network connection on bottom right.
then properties then scroll down to TCP/IP
Now click on USE the following DNS and type in these numbers ( these are opensource numbers)
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
click apply and see if it makes a difference - it made a massive difference with me, if doesnt just follw steps again and this time clcik obtain automatically to use SKYS again.