In reply to a post by narz:

My O2 line at the moment is trouble free in latency and throughput, but this is what my graph at the moment looks like!

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/831a87a979b...

Well, hopefully it will look a heck of a lot better on Plusnet fibre

In reply to a post by KellyD:

ICMP traffic should be (and is) in Titanium queue.

I'm mostly concerned about seeing any increases in the baseline green section of the graph. That is likely to represent some sort of contention or failure between the TBB BQM servers and the router responding. We often see a baseline rise there when the router is busy doing other stuff rather than responding to the ping, or when there is exchange level congestion. It also increased when we had a device issue earlier in the year. (lots of threads about that over on community), but that was really dramatic and obvious!

Re: the peak time lift we see in the average and maximum latency? We've had a look and we think we've worked it out. Basically a lot of our traffic is gold traffic now and when there is a lot of gold traffic going through the devices we see a very small delay in completing the pass through of the gold traffic before returning to the titanium queue. What this looks like it means is the odd ICMP packet taking 20ms or so longer than average (representing the maximum latency increase) This occasional delay is enough to push the average by a couple of ms at peak. When you combine this increase with people stressing their routers at peak (after all, this is when you use it!) you start seeing those little rises.

We've quite a few gamers here in PN on our normal Unlimited product who come and punch me in the head if they see performance issues and I've checked with them numerous times and they've never seen any issues. I don't like seeing the rises on the graphs though because they do look worse than they actually appear to be!

Either way, this stuff is my (and my teams) bread and butter. If you are experiencing performance issues, yell and we'll be all over it.

From my experience of seeing this on the TBB quality meter, it 's jitter, an abnormal amount as far a general networking goes,

This is likely to be caused by a link somewhere in or outside plusnet's network approaching the stages of congestion (reaching full utilisation), where the (Base latency) Green will show an increase this is sometimes coupled with some low level packet loss ,(AKA a ping tsunami BE/02 .had plenty of them) this jitter will be visable from the end users side too, as well as the likes of F8lure/firebrick latency monitoring tools ,
Another factor is a less than max throughput being possible ( unable to max out ds/us ) or if throughput is varing by a big amount example ranging from 70mbps to 35mbps during the same times as the jitter is present,

In reply to a post by narz:

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

The likes of Sky and BE generally show green with no or low yellow or blue (i.e. no/low jitter), 24/7, assuming an idle line.

Interesting. Is it safe to conclude Sky/Be are superior? (costs aside)

Different hardware and network topology at play, so what you see will be different even between 02 retail and wholesale , with 02/BE retail, the only time the yellow jitter was present was just prior and immediately following the green lag hump appearing which was peak time congestion across parts of their network or peering transit links due to their failure to invest in sufficient capacity


, I've seen a slightly worse version of this jitter problem, (quite aa lot of blue peaks below the yellow spikes)during office hours on a Friends connection, (BE/o2 wholesale) the supplier denied there being any issues,lol ,

As for BE/O2 being Superior , Their peering transits & routing to anything outside the uk was poor, and there are lots of complaints regarding high latency jitter /whild fluctuations in latency causing issues for online gamers , then there is the BBC iplayer streaming ,(buffering) issues that they never fixed ,

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 23-May-13 16:59:41)

This is an example of an ISP side problem:

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?action=dla...

We had a piece of kit playing up at the time. It was putting a delay on about half of the packets running through it. You can see how it forces the green minimum latency sky high. (big green spike on the left, ignore the right)

Interestingly, we hardly got any calls complaining about it. Just the guys on the forums spotting it.

They only would notice , if it affected their browsing /streaming or gaming ,VIP and unless they also had a Quality meter or f8lure graph pinging their routers or they happened to start pinging the web site etc they where having issues with, they wouldn't be aware that it was a ISP problem,as something like that would make browsing slow or would result in a timeout,

But the jitter maybe a early warning that something is reaching near capacity or some hardware /software, is possibly faulty or isn't working as it should , I wouldn't pass it off as nothing for concern , Also on the QM you posted you can see either side of the tsunami a tiny amount of the yellow jitter, and my interpretation of that graph is that who it belongs to was more or less directly connected to the faulty kit ?

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 23-May-13 17:22:47)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

They only would notice , if it affected their browsing /streaming or gaming ,VIP and unless they also had a Quality meter or f8lure graph pinging their routers or they happened to start pinging the web site etc they where having issues with, they wouldn't be aware that it was a ISP problem,as something like that would make browsing slow or would result in a timeout,

Yep. The forum peeps noticed because they were looking at their graphs, or they were gamers/VoIPing and saw a problem and used the forums to flag it.

In reply to a post by tommy45:

But the jitter maybe a early warning that something is reaching near capacity or some hardware /software, is possibly faulty or isn't working as it should , I wouldn't pass it off as nothing for concern , Also on the QM you posted you can see either side of the tsunami a tiny amount of the yellow jitter, and my interpretation of that graph is that who it belongs to was more or less directly connected to the faulty kit ?

If I remember rightly, they did also have a fault (you can see that with the big blue spikes on the right of the graph). The jitter on either side of the green spike though was actually more down to them heavily using the connection at the time.

In reply to a post by KellyD:

In reply to a post by tommy45:

They only would notice , if it affected their browsing /streaming or gaming ,VIP and unless they also had a Quality meter or f8lure graph pinging their routers or they happened to start pinging the web site etc they where having issues with, they wouldn't be aware that it was a ISP problem,as something like that would make browsing slow or would result in a timeout,

Yep. The forum peeps noticed because they were looking at their graphs, or they were gamers/VoIPing and saw a problem and used the forums to flag it.

In reply to a post by tommy45:

But the jitter maybe a early warning that something is reaching near capacity or some hardware /software, is possibly faulty or isn't working as it should , I wouldn't pass it off as nothing for concern , Also on the QM you posted you can see either side of the tsunami a tiny amount of the yellow jitter, and my interpretation of that graph is that who it belongs to was more or less directly connected to the faulty kit ?

If I remember rightly, they did also have a fault (you can see that with the big blue spikes on the right of the graph). The jitter on either side of the green spike though was actually more down to them heavily using the connection at the time.

The yellow spiking can be very similar to useage, i agree ( but can also look different depending for each connection)

But looking at the collection of TBBQM on the plusnet forum regular pattern of the yellow/blue spikes between 7-11pm (Jitter)each week night is replicated on more or less each graph that some would say maybe is indication that something isn't right, a precursor to more serious issues that customers may see in the not too distant future if they happen to be correct

In reply to a post by tommy45:

But looking at the collection of TBBQM on the plusnet forum regular pattern of the yellow/blue spikes between 7-11pm (Jitter)each week night is replicated on more or less each graph that some would say maybe is indication that something isn't right, a precursor to more serious issues that customers may see in the not too distant future if they happen to be correct

Remember it is really easy to cause a yellow spike - one packet in 100 (ie 100 seconds) will cause a yellow peak. The presence of the blue line then tells you how often it is happening.

Most of the evening peaks show a distinct yellow peak (ie the maximum has raised a lot) with a hint of blue (ie the average hasn't increased that much), and quite often with barely a flicker of the blue.

I think that fits with Kelly's explanation - that sometimes (and occasionally) the Titanium queue isn't serviced for 20ms while the Gold queue is being dealt with.

So to say that "something isn't right" about this depends on how often it happens.

If this happens to 1% of the ping packets, you'll see a yellow peak without a blue peak. If it happens to 10% of ping packets, you'll see a yellow peak with a 2ms hint of blue. If this happens to 50% of ping packets, you see a significant lump of blue.

It is hard to judge all the time, as the picture changes if you are actually downloading a lot over your own link. Therefore you can't always see anomalies on other people's graphs correctly...

However, I can say that on *my* graph (where I know very little happened yesterday), it looks like the ping packets did get these 20ms delays, but for less than 5% most of the time and 10% sometimes.

It does seem a strange queuing policy though - that you real-time titanium traffic *can* be delayed by large volumes of gold traffic. Perhaps the 20ms time-slicing is a little too coarse - even if it doesn't happen all the time.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

It does seem a strange queuing policy though - that you real-time titanium traffic *can* be delayed by large volumes of gold traffic. Perhaps the 20ms time-slicing is a little too coarse - even if it doesn't happen all the time.

And the fact that it appears on Nearly every graph, across most if not all the plusnet network , it's the underlying cause if such exists that could be key to why this is happening, and should this be coupled with a lower level of throughput ,it would reinforce the theory of some links reaching full or near to full utilisation (congestion) or something else that isnt able to cope with the peak time traffic flow properly

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 23-May-13 20:30:26)

Very happy with my PlusNet fibre after 1 week in !!

[IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/2727191904.png[/IMG]

Cheers