Slow browsing - take two

I'm going to ask this again because I had a couple of interesting suggestions last time. Unfortunately they didn't solve the problem.

Machine:
Acer Aspire 5740z, Windows 7x64, 4GB RAM, Dual Core something-or-other.

Symptoms:
If my laptop has been asleep/hibernated for longer than fifteen minutes then:
* bbc.news.co.uk or digitalspy.co.uk (or in fact most web sites) causes a long delay. Nearly half a minute before the web page loads.
* forums.thinkbroadband.com and theregister.co.uk are not effected.
* No matter how long the laptop is left showing the desktop the above two statements are true.
* If the browser is launched then left doing nothing for half a minute the delay doesn't occur. While waiting for a 'delayed' site you can open undelayed sites quite happily. After the delay period is over everything is fine.
* (this one is a kicker) it affects both browsers on the laptop (IE and Chrome) individually. That is - having experienced the delay with Chrome you can open IE (many minutes later) and it suffers the same delay.
* The delay doesn't occur if you close the browser then restart it.
* The delay doesn't occur if you put the laptop to sleep then wake it again within ten minutes or so.

Conclusion
It seems to me that something that both browsers are relying on for certain web pages has a long start up period. It is needs to restart if the laptop sleeps for more than about ten minutes. Once it's got going for a particular browser if you launch a different browser it has to be started again.

Solutions tried to far:
* Networking diagnostics - everything is fine. No surprise since as long as you don't visit an affected site within the first half minute everything is fine plus while one site is a delayed other sites are not.
* Disable Avast - no difference.
* Disable ad blocker - no difference.
* Remove shortcut to local network folder from desktop - no difference.
* Analyse network traffic with Wireshark - no obvious difference other than timings. You can see an approximately twenty second drop in traffic and the gap between connecting to the site and getting the response. So confirmation of the problem but no explanation.
* Analyse process activity using SysInternals ProcMon - similar to analysing network traffic although it's scary how much Chrome is doing under the covers. It spends about a tenth of a second apparently looking for DLL injected code and makes a gob smacking number of registry queries most of which fail because the key isn't there.

So I'm stumped as well as irritated. After all what's the point in having a laptop sleeping by your side so that it can be ready in two seconds if you have to wait an extra half a minute before you can browse? For what it's worth the laptop is pretty much only used for browsing. I'm way past the age of wanting to install lots of [censored] just to see what it's like. I get to tinker with OSes in my day job so my main machine at home has almost nothing installed on it.

Oh and the server upstairs (also Win7) doesn't suffer from this. It has its own performance issues because it's a 1GHz Atom with only 1GB of RAM but within the constraints of 5w power consumption it runs fine

Have you tried it after launching IE and / or Chrome with no add-ons?

DNS cache?

In reply to a post by nredwood:

Have you tried it after launching IE and / or Chrome with no add-ons?

Yup. Doesn't make any difference

In reply to a post by Deadbeat:

DNS cache?

I tried an ipconfig/flushdns but no change.

What does a traceroute or pathping tell you?

Honestly: I think you are looking too deep into this.

I suspect there is a program or service you have installed (most likely security related) which is causing this problem. I would be uninstalling all security related products and then re-checking the issue.

It sounds potentially like something related to DNS, do you have any sort of funky non-standard configuration going on here?

Do you have anything in the hosts file?

Can you double check advanced TCP/IP settings and compare to your machine upstairs..

Try disabling IPv6 stack, as well as virtual network adapters...

Edited by Pipexer (Fri 17-Feb-12 23:09:28)

Safe mode with networking?

my gut guess is this.

those domains are NOT caching and do a net lookup. (the ones without issue)

the slow ones check cache file on hdd which needs to wakeup and is slow to wakeup.

alternatively.

the 2 fast ones are caching and respond with cached content.
the rest need to wait for net connection to reestablish after hibernate.

both are not strong diagnosis given the workarounds you say that work.

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

As regards tcp/ip settings those are almost the same between machines. However it does occur to me that the other machine has a wired connection so I'll see if that makes a difference. I have my doubts given that it's site specific but worth a try.

They have the same security software installed: Windows Firewall, Avast and an ad blocker.

Safe mode with networking is worth a try.

I'm not sure about caching. It's plausible but the HDD in the laptop seems perfectly fine and it shouldn't be slow to access. Kind of a [censored] cache if it is, lol.

Traceroute to bbc.co.uk:

1 47 ms 99 ms 99 ms bebox.config [192.168.1.254]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 18 ms 18 ms 20 ms 10.1.3.178
4 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms bbc-gw0-linx.prt0.thdoe.bbc.co.uk [195.66.224.10
3]
5 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms 212.58.238.129
6 17 ms 19 ms 17 ms 132.185.254.145
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 18 ms 17 ms 18 ms ae0.er01.telhc.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.109]
9 22 ms 18 ms 18 ms 132.185.255.148
10 18 ms 17 ms 17 ms bbc-vip102.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.57]

But if that was an issue it ought to be a constant problem not just a one time hit.

I'll get back to you all

Edited by Andrue (Sat 18-Feb-12 18:27:17)

Being wired makes no difference.

Safe mode with networking appears to solve the issue which is interesting. That confirms some kind of service or application issue.