Alright here is the situation.
I am on a windows machine on a network which connects thousands of users including myself onto internet1 which when congested gets very slow.
The linux machine however although connected to the same network uses a separate internet2 (very fast due to low usage).

I used putty to create an SSH tunnel to the linux machine in order to gain access to the faster internet, however the speed does not seem to change whatsoever.

The weird thing is I also have virtual box installed on my machine with a copy of linux installed on that which i run in a window. With that I opened an SSH tunnel and ran firefox through that. These are the results i got using pingtest . net

During peak hours.
internet1(using putty and socks5 in firefox options): 1200ms
internet2(using virtual box w/ ssh -x tunneled firefox): 35ms

here is a little visual representation of what I think the network looks like.

Windows.---------------.Linux
...|......................|
...|......................|
...|......................|
...|......................|
internet1.............internet2
(ignore the dotss)

final note*
-I feel that maybe putty might be using my internet1 to access the linux server then go through internet2.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve this? (Thank you in advance)

Wild guess: was network.proxy.socks_remote_dns turned for firefox?

I tried setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns value to true in the config settings (as default is false)
but it had no effect whatsoever.
So I set it back to false.

Any other suggestions?
Once again thank you in advance.

Maybe you can try follow this link to test if the proxy is really being used:

http://www.devdaily.com/unix/edu/put...h-tunnel.shtml

Basically close putty but set firefox to use the same proxy setting.

Also are you sure pingtest.net is using the proxy? I tried it and it doesn't
work on my linux browser...

Thanks for replying.
I tried closing the SSH tunnel while leaving the proxy settings on the firefox browser.
This resulted in the browser not being able to connect to the internet so i'm assuming the SSH tunnel and proxy config are working.

As for pingtest. net not using the tunnel/proxy i'm not sure how the page would load in that case.


Any other suggestions?
Thanks.

I saw this in the pingtest.net page:

Pingtest.net uses Java for packet loss testing, and you might be prompted to approve our applet after starting a test.

Maybe you should try some basic web downloading (with remote dns proxy enabled) to compare first.

It looks like you are using the public internet domain name or the internet IP address associated with your linux server in order to do the port forwarding. The path essentially looks like this:

windows -> internet1 -> internet2 -> linux -> internet2

What you want to do is use the internal IP address or internal name that is associated with the linux system. If you do an ipconfig in the windows terminal, you will see that your ip address starts with something like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x. When you are ssh'd into your linux server, do an ifconfig to get its ip address internal to your network and use it instead. This would give you a connection that looks more like this:

windows -> linux -> internet2

By the way, if you use ssh -X from your virtualbox linux and then run firefox from the command line, you essentially see what you would see if you were using firefox physically at the linux server. It does not produce an accurate comparison for your purposes. It is kinda like vnc or remote desktop.

To produce a more accurate comparison in virtualbox, use ssh -D localhost:4000 username@linuxServer and then use the firefox proxy settings just like you did in windows.

I SSH'd onto the linux server and typed ifconfig
and found the inet addr, Bcast, Mask.

I tried to then SSH using all three separately.

The only one that worked was the inet addr which simply gave me the same results as before.
seems like it was doing the previous Windows->internet1->internet2->Linux->internet2

is there some other number that I should have seen?

Thank you once again for your help.