As long as we are on this subject, I've had trouble with slow service in the past. Sometimes it's a particular site and one assumes the site itself is experiencing heavy traffic. Sometimes it is multiple sights but not all sites and I'm at a loss to explain it. And sometimes all pages are loading slowly and I want to throw my shoe at the TV when the Comcast commercial comes on with the song lyrics, "free from interruptions and slowdowns".
My son was concerned maybe a neighbor was using the service and streaming a video or something on our unprotected wifi. But now I have a password protected router and the speed is fast most of the time. But every now and again pages still don't load fast. Just today the USPS and EBay sites wouldn't load while the Yahoo and Infinity sites did.
So what is going on? Does Comcast control loading speeds during peak traffic times? Is it always just the web sites themselves? Are there neighbors using my connection?
That's a good question (why your service is sometimes slow).
It's tough to say when I don't know what your specific setup is; there are a few basic things which could help explain it though.
Bear with me while I give a rough outline here.
In it's essence, the signal/procedure for viewing a website is as follows:
1) You type in
www.google.com into your browser.
2) The browser first checks with your hosts file to see if there's an entry for that address. If so, the browser goes to that IP address that's listed in the hosts file. If not,
3) The browser goes out to (usually) your Internet Service Providers (ISP) Domain Name Service (DNS) servers to fetch the IP address for the name you typed.
4) The browser then goes to that IP address and then begins to fetch the content from that server PLUS any other servers that may be involved with third-party content, such as ad banners, javascripts, embedded videos, and so on.
5) The content is then displayed on your browser.
It's during steps (3) and (4) which can cause noticeable hangs or 'slowness.'
In my experience, most ISP's DNS servers are about as slow as molasses in winter. I always invariably statically set the DNS servers on the computers and modems of machines wherever I go to DNS servers which I know are speedy. I can tell you how to do this if you're interested. The hosts file which I mentioned in step (2) also ties into this and my next point.
Step (4) can be slow because a certain webpage that you're interested in -- like msn.com -- also has third-party ad servers that msn.com pulls from and pushes that content to you, so you not only have to call and load the content from MSN's servers, but these various, hidden ad servers (well, hidden to you anyway) as well. So there's another bottleneck -- MSN's servers could be pushing gigabit speeds, but an ad server it links to could only be pushing dialup speeds, for example, and this overall slows down your MSN page-viewing pleasure. Now, if you have a comprehensive 'anti-ad' hosts file, you can skip the vast majority of the crap that comes with step (4) because, as I've outlined above, the hosts file (my step 2) is checked well before any content would be pulled from those ad servers. This is a free, easy, universal method of avoiding much of the junk ad banners, thus speeding up significantly your browsing pleasure.
Another issue that crops up is that a particular server that is hosting the page you want to view could be being viewed by tens of thousands of people, legitimately and unfortunately overwhelming that particular server, which again makes your viewing slower than you might normally experience as it has to serve the content out to the viewers who "got there first."
Finally, with services such as DSL, a neighborhood is essentially sharing the same fiber link to their ISP. And in the US, the ISP's are notorious for overselling their internet services. This overselling means that you and all of your neighbors who are on this same circuit could be using it at the same time, and thus all your surfing is slowed.
Anyway, to be a little more fair to the ISP's I still find it pretty amazing that I can ping a server on the other side of the planet within miliseconds. That's a lot of work by a huge number of dedicated and intelligent people to keep this up and working as well as it does.
