Perhaps Joe can post his email address in case any one drops out at least he can be contacted about it.
Or email it to me because I can't connect here most of the time.
Some further discussions with my IT man led to some more experimenting. My feeling is that the issue lies at the server end.
We thought it may relate to the MTU so I played around with those and the results are interesting. I found a few cases where people reduced the MTU in Windows 7 and overcame this same problem I have, and others where it has not made any difference.
I looked at various packet sizes for both Google, Aussiestockforums and a couple of others I visit regularly. The results should have been the same, but weren't.
As expected, pinging at 1500 (Windows7 default), the packet was too large and needed to be fragmented to be sent. This is normal, slows the speed down a little but usually not noticeable. Happens on nearly all computers.
On incrementally decreasing the MTU value using the Google site, at 1450, the packet did not need to be fragmented and it pinged normally. This means if the packet size is reduced to 1450, then theoretically, optimum speed is achieved, assuming the other end can handle that size. If the other end can’t accept a packet that large and needs to break it down then there is no real advantage. Same result with my other regular sites.
There is a school of thought that W7 can be tweaked to reduce the MTU down from its 1500 but it is unlikely that even if there is any speed difference it will probably not be noticed.
The point is that at 1450 works well going to Google (and to other of the sites I regularly visit)
When I did the same thing with ASF, it behaved very differently to all the others. Reducing the MTU incrementally did give similar results UNTIL I reached the correct packet size. Instead of pinging normally without fragmenting the packet (as should occur and occurred with all the others I tried) the pings timed out.
The normal ping which uses a very small packet worked fine.
There is one other factor which I have noticed that when I have been able to connect, it was off peak (late night and early mornings) when there is less traffic. As the traffic increases and in some case things slow down a tad, I lose the connection to ASF. Again, I connected this morning but will most likely lose the connection shortly.
To me, all that indicates there is something very different at the ASF server end. So a few questions could be:
- has the site been moved to another server in the past year or so? because I can not remember having this issue in the dim past;
- are we sharing the server?
- and if so, what are those sites so those of us with the problem can see if those sites give the same result as ASF which would then strongly indicate a server issue.
I could change the MTU in Windows 7 on my computer, but I am not inclined to fiddle with my operating system for possibly questionable results overall, for the sake of the only site I have a problem with. My IT man advised to be careful modifying the MTU because TCP/IP performance is based on a lot of different variables and changing one might totally stuff up other settings.
I think it’s over to you Joe.
Cheers
Country Lad