Re: Annoying pauses

Brian Rice (bri@whitestone.com)
Wed, 20 Sep 1995 19:33:45 -0700 (PDT)

> Recently I have ben noticing long delays and pauses when connecting though
> our portmaster. On a 28.8 connection, ping times are around 150ms for
> around a dozen, then suddenly shoot up for over 4000ms for a few then
> back to normal. This is pinging the portmaster from a remote PPP dialin.
> It's not the ethernet, it is nowhere close to being oversaturated.

Well, ping is a really awful way to test performance, but that aside this
can occur when any one (or more) of the following are true:

DNS lookups can sometimes get whacked.
Your modem is in re-train state.
You could be hitting a route flap.
Your ethernet could be getting temporarily flooded with something nasty.

Oh, and ping between what and what? For example, if you ping the PortMaster
(I'm assuming you're dialed into it with some remote app) directly are you
seeing this high number? Or are you pinging some upstream node? What I'm
after here is that it may be something beyond you and your PortMaster.

> Any ideas? This is causing Web browsing to be a pain when this problem
> starts up. I read some comments about MTU values earlier. Thanks.

No, MTU would have nothing to do with this problem description.

--
Bri