[Tech] Need help with the Internet at the Mentone ("slow" ... latency? and/or connectivity?)

[Michael Paoli]

Sounds like you've got latency issue, not necessarily bandwidth
issue(s).  The very long times on ping to Google would
reflect latency issues.  It's not uncommon for ISPs to support
large buffering - this gives 'em a slight edge in most typical
bandwidth tests ... and the cost of latency - as/when the
bandwidth is quite saturated, buffers fill, and hence latency
can be quite to even exceedingly high.  This can then trigger various
errors, such as DNS timeouts - which might well be why your
"speed tests" failed - but can't really tell from the limited output
that check provided (the CLI tool may have options for more details,
and/or one may use additional diagnostics to check what's happening
when the speed test is attempted - which may then make clear why the
test is failing).  Shared usage of bandwidth can be an issue, e.g.
multiple computers, etc., and single "pipe" of some fixed limited
bandwidth to Internet.  If one machine is hogging it all, or even
multiple are together trying to use all the bandwidth, that will
make it "slow" for them, and anything else attempting to share that
bandwidth.

Anyway, realized and understand that bandwidth (speed), and latency
(how long does the trip take) are not the same thing.  Either may
be perceived as "slow", depending upon the nature of the usage.

If, as you mention, you're having problems even doing the updates,
it's likely either issues with latency causing issues with DNS,
and/or more general connectivity issues (which may also be caused
by latency issues).  "Slow" - as in low bandwidth, will not
in-and-of-itself break "speed"tests or getting updates on-line ...
were it only a bandwidth issue, things would just take longer ...
possibly *much* longer.

> From: "Christian Einfeldt" <einfeldt at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Tech] Need help with the Internet at the Mentone
> Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2016 11:50:55 -0700

> Hi,
>
> Here are my questions:
>
>    1. Why did my speed tests fail in this situation?
>    2. Are the ping speeds normal for this situation?
>    3. What diagnostic tests can I run to isolate the slowness on this
>    system?
>
> As most people on this list know, Partimus is volunteering for a low income
> housing shelter in here in SF.  I have put in some quality legacy Lubuntu
> machines in the lobby for the residents to use.  These machines all have
> Intel Core 2 duo chips with 2 GB of RAM and are running Lubuntu 14.04.  I
> use a similar machine at home, and have no problems with it.  This email is
> being written on such a machine at one of the other two homeless shelters.
> The residents routinely use these machines to watch YouTube video and use
> LibreOffice, etc., all without issue.  The machines are proven good.
>
> This is the third shelter to which we have given machines.  They don't have
> a budget for either the equipment or the tech support for these machines.
>
> Two of the three shelters have good speed on the Internet that goes to the
> machines.  (The shelters provide the Internet service).
>
> However, the third shelter, called the Mentone, has slow Internet speeds in
> the lobby.  I am not able to even do anything as basic as run sudo apt-get
> update, as the machine chokes on downloading the updates.
>
> The wiring is put in place by a company I will call the Maintenance Group
> (MG).  I have called both the MG and the ISP.  Both of them claim that they
> have no problems.  The ISP says that they are providing the usual 2 Mbit /
> second that we expect here in the US for a configuration like this.  The MG
> says that they have run a test on the wiring from the server to the lobby,
> and are not seeing any problems.
>
> The ISP is a good company that does not hate GNU-Linux.
>
> The ISP asked me to give them a speed test directly from the switch, which
> is located in the basement.  So I ran speed tests in the basement and in
> the lobby, and was unable to get the speed test to work.  Speed test has
> worked on this machine before.  Here are the two results:
>
> Lobby, where the Lubuntu machine is to be located:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ speedtest-cli
>
> Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
>
> Could not retrieve speedtest.net configuration: timed out
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ifconfig
>
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 20:1a:06:04:64:42
>          inet addr:172.16.2.121
>
> basement, directly from the switch:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ speedtest-cli
>
> Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
>
> Could not retrieve speedtest.net configuration: timed out
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$
>
> *My first question:  *I am not sure why this speed test failed.  Does
> anyone know?
>
> Since I couldn't run speedtest, I pinged google instead.  Here are the
> results from the lobby:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ping www.google.com
>
> PING www.google.com (216.58.192.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
>
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52
> time=8.24 ms
>
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52
> time=7.31 ms
> <snip>
>
> --- www.google.com ping statistics ---
>
> 16 packets transmitted, 12 received, 25% packet loss, time 15037ms
>
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.962/7.497/8.198/0.366 ms
>
> Here is the test from the basement:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ping www.google.com
>
> PING www.google.com (216.58.192.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
>
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52
> time=8.24 ms
>
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52
> time=7.31 ms
> <snip>
>
> --- www.google.com ping statistics ---
>
> 11 packets transmitted, 11 received, 0% packet loss, time 10015ms
>
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.022/7.816/8.519/0.451 ms
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$
>
> *My second question*: Are these ping speeds normal?
>
> My third question: What can I do to find the problem with the system?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Christian Einfeldt