School's Broadband / Netsweeper slow performance?

[MrWu]

Hi all;

 

We have been using a temporary setup for our existing 200mb Virgin lease line with School's broadband temporary Netsweeper webproxy for a few months, till we switch over fully to their 1Gb School's broadband line summer holidays.

 

We are having performance issues (particularly this morning, where it fails due to latency on speedtest) and generally web browsing is slow (in Chrome you can see it flash up with 'Waiting for Proxy tunnel' on the task bar

 

I have logged this with tech support but the basic answer is they can't help us due to them having no control over my existing ISP's line trying to connect with School's Broadband Netwseeper Proxy.

 

Which is fair enough, but what factors would affect performance and what can be checked and tested short term? (School's BB have tried different proxy servers and ports and we have same issue) internet works perfectly without the Proxy filter.

 

Also does using a webproxy impact on performance anyway?

 

Thanks as always.

 

Wil

[caffrey]

If the internet is fine without then surely it's the proxy,

[MrWu]

If the internet is fine without then surely it's the proxy,

 

My first thought too, although they said can't help since I am not using their own lease line at the moment (we will in summer when the notice period ends on our current provider)

 

Tracert runs perfectly on my current Virgin line, so unless our Firewall is lagging for some reason...

 

unfortunately its the first thing support questions when there is an issue! (Not their issue)

[caffrey]

And 9 times out of 10 it is...

[SchoolsBroadband]

hi @MrWu,

 

I'd recommend using a trace ping command which will send constant pings to each network hop along the way. if you're getting high latency at any point this could indicate an issue on that router. That's just a start of course and there are many more tests that can be done.

 

The support guys are correct in what they say as off-net connections are a temporary solution which we've used to help in your specific circumstance. They generally work fine but depending on your ISP and its network and our interconnects into it (via transit / peering etc) will affect its speed so we can't guarantee speed into another ISP's network unless we have a specific agreement with them to do so. This though is the same for any cloud based service on the Internet if it's not "on net" to the same carrier.

 

Take Azure for example, they don't give you guaranteed speeds into that service unless you purchase Microsoft Express Connect, otherwise it's best efforts.

 

I've sent you a PM though with a few things to try which can help.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[MrWu]

hi @MrWu,

 

I'd recommend using a trace ping command which will send constant pings to each network hop along the way. if you're getting high latency at any point this could indicate an issue on that router. That's just a start of course and there are many more tests that can be done.

 

The support guys are correct in what they say as off-net connections are a temporary solution which we've used to help in your specific circumstance. They generally work fine but depending on your ISP and its network and our interconnects into it (via transit / peering etc) will affect its speed so we can't guarantee speed into another ISP's network unless we have a specific agreement with them to do so. This though is the same for any cloud based service on the Internet if it's not "on net" to the same carrier.

 

Take Azure for example, they don't give you guaranteed speeds into that service unless you purchase Microsoft Express Connect, otherwise it's best efforts.

 

I've sent you a PM though with a few things to try which can help.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

Thank you

 

Just testing by moving a few of my PCs into Schools Broadband cloud router and re-pointing the gateway, little faster but same issues (with latency errors, and ones that can run the test are giving very varied performance (we have a 1Gb lease line from you)

[SchoolsBroadband]

you're welcome.

 

I've sent you a PM again on some things you need to do when moving over. If they don't work let me know and I'll get an engineer to look into it for you.

 

Please use our own speedtest.net server (Talk Straight Ilkley) to do some speed testing with as that'll give the most reliable results although we can also do iperf tests as well but I'd need to get an engineer to talk through that with you also.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Edu-IT]

Netsweeper down, database error?

[andy_b]

Yup, help desk had 26 calls in queue...

[synaesthesia]

*thump* - head hitting desk.

[SchoolsBroadband]

massive internal DDoS targeted at the web admins specifically. You should already be back up. We're investigating.

 

Dave

[MrWu]

Just cleared up now I think...

 

Had all sorts of weird SSL errors and then it cleared up, I presume when I rang into tech support, with the call volume there was a bigger issue, so told my school we will investigate.

[Edu-IT]

Thanks. Was quickly resolved.

[Slum90]

We host our own Netsweeper gateway onsite. We have latency issues and speeds are slow. Just recently we have found issues with nsproxy constantly erroring and causing it to restart. Just waiting for the errors to dump into a file then I can send them off to be checked over (we have checked the connected without this proxy and speeds are great).