Installed Ubuntu 10.04 and networking is incredibly slow

Hb_Kai · 08-25-2010, 11:03 AM

Hi.

I have been a Linux user in the past for a good couple of years but I got back into gaming and left Linux for a while. Now after coming back to it, I have just installed Ubuntu 10.4 and all networking just seems incredibly slow.

I've browsed the internet as much as I can and found those Firefox pipelining tweaks all over the place; trying them makes no difference whatsoever so I decided to take a temporary solution and resort to OpenDNS but even this feels obviously too slow for the broadband I have.

Not only with loading web pages in Firefox, I have also tried downloading files from the internet and trying Google Chrome. But neither of these were right either.

I'm almost 90% sure it's not my BTHomeHub that's causing the problems because when using Windows, it works just fine and internet speeds are perfectly normal. The only OS I'm having this speed problem with is Ubuntu.

I'm unsure as to what evidence/help I can post, pings, IPv4/IPv6 information or WiFi configurations? I'm not sure but if there's anything I can do to post here that would help I can.

Just wondering though, this seems to be a big problem with Ubuntu 10.04 so has anyone had and solved this problem before and returned their internet speeds to what they should be?

Thanks.

business_kid · 08-25-2010, 12:48 PM

This box was dead slow in ubuntu and I never sorted it - just moved on. That was slow all over, not just network. This is all amd inside.

Have you a wired/wireless?
What's your broadband speed?
Please post your resolv.conf. This is commonly overwritten by startup scripts and you have to give them the correct info to overwrite it with :-/. Check resolv.conf online, or find where and set (something like)
DHCP_KEEP_RESOLV = "TRUE"
The places to check, btw are
/etc/sysconfig/networking
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

tredegar · 08-25-2010, 12:52 PM

I am running 10.04 (amongst others). My ISP is BT, and my telephone exchange is about 400 metres away. I use a netgear DG834G modem/router, not the BT-HomeHub (which I threw out).

I have no problems with speed, it flies: 19706 kbps downstream

business_kid · 08-26-2010, 03:39 AM

I would check 2 things

1 check that your resolv.conf is not overwritten by connection scripts when you connect; or if it is, that the new one makes sense
mine gets overwritten with 192.168.0.1 as the only address, which makes for a long delay. Report back on this

2. Do a traceroute to www.australia.gov.au or somewhere like that and find if there's delays

tredegar · 08-26-2010, 11:10 AM

Disabling IPV6 is worth a try:
Edit /etc/default/grub to read

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="ipv6.disable=1"

then run sudo update-grub
then reboot

Hb_Kai · 08-26-2010, 10:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tredegar

Disabling IPV6 is worth a try:
Edit /etc/default/grub to read

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="ipv6.disable=1"

then run sudo update-grub
then reboot

I have tried this but it didn't seem to do anything different. To make sure IPv6 is disabled I tried running lsmod | grep ipv6 and gave me no output.

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

This box was dead slow in ubuntu and I never sorted it - just moved on. That was slow all over, not just network. This is all amd inside.

Have you a wired/wireless?
What's your broadband speed?
Please post your resolv.conf. This is commonly overwritten by startup scripts and you have to give them the correct info to overwrite it with :-/. Check resolv.conf online, or find where and set (something like)
DHCP_KEEP_RESOLV = "TRUE"
The places to check, btw are
/etc/sysconfig/networking
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

I could not find any directories for /etc/sysconfig, even with looking for hidden directories, /sysconfig is not there.
I'm using an Atheros AR5005G chipset and am currently having all these problems with my wireless.
I would try see what it's like with the wire but it's not working at the minute and have to buy a replacement wire so until then I'm stuck with wireless. There are not currently many things that can interfer with the wireless signals though. TV is in the same room along with a couple of mobile phones around but if it was interferances like that, why would Windows be so much faster than Ubuntu still?

Code:

@boris:~$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
domain home
search home
nameserver 192.168.1.254

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

I would check 2 things

1 check that your resolv.conf is not overwritten by connection scripts when you connect; or if it is, that the new one makes sense
mine gets overwritten with 192.168.0.1 as the only address, which makes for a long delay. Report back on this

2. Do a traceroute to www.australia.gov.au or somewhere like that and find if there's delays

To be honest, I don't really know how to check is there are delays with traceroutes but here's the output:

Code:

@boris:~$ traceroute www.australia.gov.au
traceroute to www.australia.gov.au (205.239.168.12), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  BThomehub.home (192.168.1.254)  70.313 ms  69.845 ms  69.443 ms
 2  217.47.250.186 (217.47.250.186)  36.698 ms  38.530 ms  42.590 ms
 3  217.47.200.161 (217.47.200.161)  44.453 ms  46.652 ms  48.530 ms
 4  213.1.69.66 (213.1.69.66)  57.434 ms  57.502 ms  59.240 ms
 5  217.32.24.22 (217.32.24.22)  60.451 ms  62.381 ms  66.331 ms
 6  217.32.24.178 (217.32.24.178)  68.252 ms  36.610 ms  39.866 ms
 7  acc1-10GigE-0-1-0-6.l-far.21cn-ipp.bt.net (109.159.249.94)  37.741 ms acc1-10GigE-0-1-0-4.l-far.21cn-ipp.bt.net (109.159.249.70)  38.469 ms acc1-10GigE-0-0-0-5.l-far.21cn-ipp.bt.net (109.159.249.78)  39.822 ms
 8  core1-te0-4-0-6.ealing.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.1)  41.874 ms core1-te0-13-0-6.ealing.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.17)  36.856 ms core1-te0-4-0-6.ealing.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.1)  40.856 ms
 9  transit1-xe0-0-0.ealing.ukcore.bt.net (62.6.200.106)  41.168 ms  42.231 ms  43.916 ms
10  t2c1-ge14-0-0.uk-eal.eu.bt.net (166.49.168.25)  41.907 ms  38.487 ms  40.331 ms
11  t2c2-p3-1.uk-lon1.eu.bt.net (166.49.208.110)  44.392 ms  46.130 ms  39.333 ms
12  t2a5-ge2-1.uk-lon1.eu.bt.net (166.49.135.116)  41.175 ms  45.805 ms  47.060 ms
13  i-5-1-2-peer.ulco-core01.pr.reach.com (134.159.95.25)  49.018 ms  53.137 ms  55.363 ms
14  i-5-2.nwk-core01.bx.reach.com (202.84.144.85)  136.119 ms  136.102 ms  141.127 ms
15  i-14-2-1.wil-core02.bi.reach.com (202.84.141.130)  216.973 ms  218.883 ms  179.251 ms
16  i-3-0-1.sydp-core02.bx.reach.com (202.84.144.102)  329.327 ms  331.182 ms  333.445 ms
17  TenGigabitEthernet0-2-0-0.pad-gw2.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.13.45)  326.930 ms  329.054 ms  332.985 ms
18  Bundle-Ether3.ken-core4.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.30)  336.616 ms  338.765 ms  340.561 ms
19  TenGigabitEthernet4-1.ken37.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.20.52)  342.459 ms  327.046 ms  328.865 ms
20  edsaus8.lnk.telstra.net (139.130.248.198)  340.919 ms  344.976 ms  346.993 ms
21  * * *
22  * * *
23  * * *
24  * * *
25  * * *
26  * * *
27  * * *
28  * * *
29  * * *
30  * * *

I'm beginning to wonder if moving back to Ubuntu was the right choice now, though so may consider something like OpenSUSE or Fedora. Do these problems occur so commonly or is IPv6 default in either of those two would anyone know?

Thanks for all the feedback.

business_kid · 08-27-2010, 03:04 AM

sorry about /etc/sysconfig. Most of the distros seem to use that.

Your resolv.conf is poor. Put something like

search yourisp.com opendns.org
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

and see if that helps. That's ppendns.org. Your traceroute tells me the connection is slow atm. My times are 15-30 ms in the main, although I do have a slow one with 130ms. I was looking for the configuration information for your distro. If you can find that, let's see what it says and we can get wifi singing. Don't worry about electrical noise - believe me it's not a huge issue at the frequencies wifi can use. It even selects a quiet channel for itself.

Hb_Kai · 08-27-2010, 08:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

sorry about /etc/sysconfig. Most of the distros seem to use that.

Your resolv.conf is poor. Put something like

search yourisp.com opendns.org
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

and see if that helps. That's ppendns.org. Your traceroute tells me the connection is slow atm. My times are 15-30 ms in the main, although I do have a slow one with 130ms. I was looking for the configuration information for your distro. If you can find that, let's see what it says and we can get wifi singing. Don't worry about electrical noise - believe me it's not a huge issue at the frequencies wifi can use. It even selects a quiet channel for itself.

No problem.
I tried what you said above and if anything seemed to have made it go worse. I ran namebench to see if I could find any other DNS servers I could use but apparently BT's was the fastest it could find.

I have tried troubleshooting using many of the Ubuntu wiki pages and other forums I've seen but none of them seemed to help. No matter what I do the wireless is just slow. Checking the router, there doesn't seem to be any problem there either nor is there any firmware I can update to which might fix it so I'm at the firmware's latest version.

tredegar · 08-27-2010, 09:45 AM

Code:

 1  BThomehub.home (192.168.1.254)  70.313 ms  69.845 ms  69.443 ms

My router responds a lot faster:

Code:

tred@vaio:~$ traceroute router
traceroute to router (10.0.0.2), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  router.home.net (10.0.0.2)  2.618 ms  3.672 ms  4.081 ms
tred@vaio:~$ traceroute www.australia.gov.au
traceroute to www.australia.gov.au (205.239.168.12), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  router.home.net (10.0.0.2)  5.148 ms  5.670 ms  8.916 ms
 2  216.32.145.65 (216.32.145.65)  25.242 ms * *
 3  216.32.145.94 (216.32.145.94)  29.998 ms  31.641 ms  31.708 ms
^C
tred@vaio:~$ ping -c3 router
PING router.home.net (10.0.0.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from router.home.net (10.0.0.2): icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=3.62 ms
64 bytes from router.home.net (10.0.0.2): icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=2.29 ms
64 bytes from router.home.net (10.0.0.2): icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=2.48 ms

--- router.home.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.290/2.802/3.629/0.593 ms
tred@vaio:~$

Do you have wireless interference? Are many other people using the same channel? Is your signal strength poor?

Hb_Kai · 08-27-2010, 10:26 AM

Signal strenght is almost as high as it can get. About a meter away. Nobody else are using the same wifi channel either, only me. I used aircrack-ng to look around at other wireless signals around this area and if there's anyone else using the same chanel and it's only me using the channel number but I changed and set the apply in the router interface page to another channel and this didn't work either - so I set it back just in case.

Just as more information: I removed all types of port forwarding I had set for various software on my Windows installation just to see if that would work at all but that didn't either.

Could it be that some type of wireless device support isn't set up in the kernel correctly? It's a fresh install so I wouldn't know and have forgotten most I used to know on Linux so I'm just getting back into it. May be far off here so it's just a question.

repo · 08-27-2010, 10:39 AM

What happens if you use a wired connection?
You could try to set the rate to 54M

Code:

iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M

Try to disable wep or wpa and see what happens

business_kid · 08-28-2010, 02:55 AM

Humour me, and switch off encryption for a test run. Do your pings and traceroutes. I use sftp for transferring files and do not get full network speed, whereas ftp does give pretty close to full speed. Your box may not like it, or your router's cpu may be challenged.

syg00 · 08-28-2010, 06:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hb_Kai

Could it be that some type of wireless device support isn't set up in the kernel correctly?

Certainly could be.
I saw something similar back with Hardy maybe - the iwlwifi driver for the Intel 3945 was abysmal. "ifconfig" showed truckloads of errors.
Eventually managed to get hold of a backported driver.

Do you see any errors in ifconfig ?.

Hb_Kai · 08-28-2010, 07:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by repo

What happens if you use a wired connection?
You could try to set the rate to 54M

Code:

iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M

Try to disable wep or wpa and see what happens

If anything this made it slower.

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

Humour me, and switch off encryption for a test run. Do your pings and traceroutes. I use sftp for transferring files and do not get full network speed, whereas ftp does give pretty close to full speed. Your box may not like it, or your router's cpu may be challenged.

I tried and that didn't change a thing.

Here's a few commands I tried after tredegar's post:

Code:

traceroute to www.australia.gov.au (205.239.168.12), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254)  50.864 ms  50.702 ms  50.563 ms
 2  217.47.250.186 (217.47.250.186)  39.438 ms  41.521 ms  50.388 ms
 3  217.47.200.161 (217.47.200.161)  52.025 ms  52.099 ms  54.291 ms
 4  213.1.69.66 (213.1.69.66)  59.229 ms  61.222 ms  65.210 ms
 5  217.32.24.22 (217.32.24.22)  67.305 ms  71.602 ms  75.307 ms
 6  217.32.24.178 (217.32.24.178)  78.987 ms  41.777 ms  44.130 ms

^C

traceroute to router (67.215.65.132), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254)  16.314 ms  15.899 ms  15.444 ms
 2  217.47.250.186 (217.47.250.186)  41.213 ms  43.338 ms  45.781 ms
 3  217.47.200.161 (217.47.200.161)  49.956 ms  53.152 ms  60.260 ms
 4  213.1.69.66 (213.1.69.66)  61.217 ms  63.381 ms  71.217 ms
 5  217.32.24.22 (217.32.24.22)  71.288 ms  76.835 ms  81.301 ms
 6  217.32.24.178 (217.32.24.178)  82.909 ms  71.678 ms  75.389 ms

^C

PING router.home.com (67.215.65.132) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hit-nxdomain.opendns.com (67.215.65.132): icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=47.8 ms
64 bytes from hit-nxdomain.opendns.com (67.215.65.132): icmp_seq=2 ttl=49 time=51.8 ms
64 bytes from hit-nxdomain.opendns.com (67.215.65.132): icmp_seq=3 ttl=49 time=54.7 ms

--- router.yourisp.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 47.804/51.449/54.706/2.843 ms

Quote:

Originally Posted by syg00

Certainly could be.
I saw something similar back with Hardy maybe - the iwlwifi driver for the Intel 3945 was abysmal. "ifconfig" showed truckloads of errors.
Eventually managed to get hold of a backported driver.

Do you see any errors in ifconfig ?.

None, unless there were certain troubleshooting commands I'm supposed to type in? But this is when running ifconfig:

Code:

ifconfig
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:200 (200.0 B)  TX bytes:200 (200.0 B)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:e3:be:49:f8  
          inet addr:192.168.1.64  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1788 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2134 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:1105163 (1.1 MB)  TX bytes:414365 (414.3 KB)

tredegar · 08-28-2010, 08:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by repo

What happens if you use a wired connection?

still needs to be answered

If you know anyone with a wireless modem/router, it might be worth borrowing that and seeing if it works any better than BT's "HomeHub". As I said, I threw my "HomeHub" out and replaced it with a netgear.