[thelist] network/performance diagnostic procedures

[Ron]

Bob Meetin wrote:
> What are some of the common things regular human being (not network 
> officianatos) can do to troubleshoot download speed issues to identify 
> probable source or root cause?
>
>

For most, download speeds are simple, your ISP is slow or the server 
you're dloading from is slow. The hops in between are seldom the problem 
(they do add lag for the gamers but generally not download slowness).

Your own hardware shouldn't be the problem if it's less than 5 years 
old. Malware can cause the problem.

However, if you have been noticing "general" slowness of the web like I 
have, the problem is probably DNS slowness. Lower left of Chrome says 
"Resolving...", Firefox says "Looking up..."  and I see that taking 2 or 
3 seconds and even more lately on comcast. Some sites link to many other 
sites, and that all needs to be looked up too. Cnn for example will need 
to resolv about 6-8 addresses to load the main page.