How to determine network speed issues?
 

Hi all,

Got a bit of an issue with a server, I mostly use VPS for my design and development work but on occassion a dedicated is better from a privacy point of view. Usually I never have any issues even with my limited command line knowledge but I stuck with this one.

Ok to get straight to the point, the dedicates server in question is in the Netherlands, it seemed slow to do anything that involved going outside itself such as downloading updated from yum or files in the US. It's unmanaged so support said they could not help unless it was a fault.

So I found a script that tested download speed which is the best way I can show you what is wrong.

So here is the script running on my UK VPS for example:

Now the above took about 2-3 minutes to run. Now the same test on this dedicated.

As you see not much happens after the above, as I type this it returned a value from Atlanta of 104kb/s. Yum takes 3 times as long as any other server/vps I have.

I installed centos6.4 on this server, did a kvm/ip net install and it all went smoothly, the only thing I noted that was different form the norm was that during the install when I selected the wired network there were 2 Eth0 and Eth1, Eth0 was dead when I selected it but Eth1 was working fine. I wonder if that is why?

I know it's not much to go on but I am hoping those of you in the know will be able to direct me somewhere. To be fair it's not stopping me doing things but it just seems wrong.

Thanks for any advice.

Can you modify the script to check European locations before the others? It is possible there are things blocking or limiting flow from the Netherlands on some of the US locations.

Additionally your comment about yum makes me wonder if this is a RHEL server? CentOS? Fedora? etc?

For RHEL they do a location aware setup to determine what servers to use when you do a yum update. This can be changed to force it to specific servers if you're in a firewall and can't go to random IPs. For the others you typically have mirror sites and usually do better having your updates come from something geographically nearer. If it is RHEL you might want to investigate the settings on their site that allow you to specify location (either to insure they are off and not forcing you to North Carolina servers, or possibly see if there is a way to specify European based servers). If it is one of the others you might want to see if there is a way to give a European mirror precedence over others.