I have a 4096 kb/sec adsl connection. Despite the fact that web pages should load quite quickly, they often take ages to fully load, and frequently stop loading completely for a few minutes at a time. Looking at received data, I can see that all internet activity stops at such times. However, if there are any other types of connections present at the same time, they resume at full speed. For instance, if I am downloading via rapidshare or bittorrent, download speeds that are as fast as they can be do not drop once when pages stop to load. programs such as msn messenger also do not lose their connection. therefore I cannot see how the problem could be caused by my router or modem. Given that my laptop does the same thing, I doubt it's my pc either (my laptop is ubuntu and my pc is vista). I have asked my adsl provider to monitor my connection and they reported nothing out of ordinary. I am baffled as to why only web pages are suffering from extreme slowness, which is quite frankly, very annoying. any help would be appreciated.

blcfx

Hello blcfx, welcome to PCHF.

Well, I really wouldn't rule out your router just yet. These differences between the programmes you mentions is that MSN, and other programmes that we shall not name can retry their connection whenever a connection is lost, and you would never notice unless the retry fails normally after the 3rd attempt. When loading a page from Internet Explorer, once the page starts to load, it needs to finish, and will not attempt any retries.

How is the laptop and the PC connected to the router, via ethernet cable or wirelessly? Do you have ASDL filters installed on all phone points in your house?

Finally, there is something I would like you to try, in order to monitor your own connection. From the Vista PC:

- Go to Start, Run and type in cmd
- From the black command window, type in ping 64.233.183.147 -t
- See if you can reproduce your problem, and then see if there are any "Request timed out" messages that appear in that window.

Hello madmonkey,
First of all, thanks for such a hasty reply. I tried the thing you asked me to do and there are no requests timing out. The reason I gave the downloading examples is that regardless of refresh rates, the download resumes and I can see the number of packages recieved increasing. At the same time, web pages do not load (If I pause the download, then packages stop coming and network activity stops and web pages continue not loading.) Once web pages stop loading, I refresh and I refresh but nothing happens. There are no messages such as "web page can't be displayed" or anything. It's just a blank white screen. Then suddenly, the page loads completely, and I can browse normally for a random amount of time ranging from seconds to hours until the next time this happens.

I doubt the problem is the router since I recently changed it. It used to be connected via cable and it's now wireless. I had the same problem before the change, but it started to happen more often after.

OK blcfx, just one more thing to do before you rule out your router, contact your ISP and make sure that your particular router is compatible. I was once having similar connection problems with a BT Voyager 2100. When I tested out another Voyager 2100, the problem remained, until I used another model router. When I contacted my ISP about this, they said that that router was no longer compatible on their network! (This router was supplied by the ISP in the first place!).

Whatever your problem is then, seems to affect only port 80 / http. Can you test something else for me if you haven't already. You said that the problem occurs on both PC's. What happens if you shut down the PC, and then test on the other, does the problem remain? And vice versa? There's a lot of activity that still operates on the PC (not sure about Ubuntu), that still operates on port 80 in the background, such as Automatic Updates. Certain types of malware will operate on the same port too.

I checked with the ISP and there seems to be no compatibility issues. One thing I would like to ask you is if some background program is utilizing my port 80, wouldn't it's activity reflect in the number of recieved packages? I recently installed vista and had xp running previously, but the problem was still there; and the installation was a clean one with a complete formatting of the hard disks so I doubt the cause is some kind of malware that manages to hide its network activity.

It would reflect on the number of packets. Depending on where your problem lies, you may not see any packet activity on port 80 whilst experiencing this problem. It's extreemly unlikely that connection problems between you, your telephone company and your ISP would only affect a single port. If you lose a connection with your ISP, it will normally be the full connection. There are a couple of ISP's however that limit the bandwidth between ports to allow faster speeds for things like gaming and video streaming and slower speeds for other services.

EDIT: Marked as Answered.