Are the NSA and friends slowing my browser?
March 16, 2016 8:54 PM Subscribe
Bandwidth is good yet browsing is laggy.
How do I test DNS lookup lag, http lag?
With a fresh phone things get slow as soon as I browse a xkeyscore site like gmail or click a muslim related link in Facebook. Am I being paranoid - can that really slow down browsing somehow? How do I test for this to see if I'm imagining it or not?
Many times when I visit a new place I connect to a new network and people start complaining how their internet has started running slow... but I have my phone in offline mode and sometimes no other changes have happened to the network. It happens as soon as I arrive anywhere. It's like it's following me around. At first I ignored it but now it's annoying. I travel a lot so I can say I've seen it happen 20-30 times - of these at least 5-10 times there was no other variable involved.
By slow I'm not talking download/upload speed - I mean lag in terms of click response primarily. It's like DNS lookups only are slow, something like this. Page load speed is also slow but I'm not sure this is the same thing:
Chrome with extensions:
Google Drive: 26seconds
Facebook 22secs
Google: 5 secs.
Firefox with extensions:
Facebook: 15secs
Drive: 37secs
Chrome without extensions:
Google Drive: 33secs
Gmail: 24secs
Routing doesn't seem too bad:
Tracert to Yahoo.co.nz is 17 hops.
Tracert to Google.com is 9 hops
Now, edge is a lot quicker due to no extensions:
Google drive: 20secs (though hard to say when really properly loaded...)... but 20seconds is still unusable. The Windows app for drive is useless since it syncs and I don't have bandwidth nor storage for that... and it only syncs certain things
My phone immediately rebooted (soft reboot not hard) when I clicked a video recently with Firefox and since that point it seems slower in terms of browsing only. This happens a lot - fresh phone, get everything installed - still fast. Then... log in to Google, Gmail and it goes slow.
Actual download and upload speeds are as expected. What I need is a way to fair way to truly test a connection - something that does a bit more than downloading a file to measure speed - something measuring lag, packet loss, number of hops, is it DNS lag? Is it http traffic? TCP or UDP? Things like this. Something platform independent I can run on my phone and then compare to Windows and linux - or a hardware device for a fair test.
VoIP traffic is unreliable. It doesn't matter if I use Skype, WhatsApp, a proper VoIP app. It doesn't matter if I'm connecting over WiFi on fiber, ADSL. It doesn't seem to help much if I'm using a laptop or my phone. The country also isn't a pattern to this. The only thing that works reliably is old style mobile phone calls. Mobile to mobile with VoIP in the middle tends to be more reliable but I've had trouble with this too. All kinds of errors - disconnects, garble, buffering. In the case of argentina I also had other people on the line. It's just weird. This has been affecting my ability to call loved ones for years now and it really annoying me. It's not as back as it was thankfully but it still causes problems sometimes.
By slow I'm not talking download/upload speed - I mean lag in terms of click response primarily. It's like DNS lookups only are slow, something like this. Page load speed is also slow but I'm not sure this is the same thing:
Chrome with extensions:
Google Drive: 26seconds
Facebook 22secs
Google: 5 secs.
Firefox with extensions:
Facebook: 15secs
Drive: 37secs
Chrome without extensions:
Google Drive: 33secs
Gmail: 24secs
Routing doesn't seem too bad:
Tracert to Yahoo.co.nz is 17 hops.
Tracert to Google.com is 9 hops
Now, edge is a lot quicker due to no extensions:
Google drive: 20secs (though hard to say when really properly loaded...)... but 20seconds is still unusable. The Windows app for drive is useless since it syncs and I don't have bandwidth nor storage for that... and it only syncs certain things
My phone immediately rebooted (soft reboot not hard) when I clicked a video recently with Firefox and since that point it seems slower in terms of browsing only. This happens a lot - fresh phone, get everything installed - still fast. Then... log in to Google, Gmail and it goes slow.
Actual download and upload speeds are as expected. What I need is a way to fair way to truly test a connection - something that does a bit more than downloading a file to measure speed - something measuring lag, packet loss, number of hops, is it DNS lag? Is it http traffic? TCP or UDP? Things like this. Something platform independent I can run on my phone and then compare to Windows and linux - or a hardware device for a fair test.
VoIP traffic is unreliable. It doesn't matter if I use Skype, WhatsApp, a proper VoIP app. It doesn't matter if I'm connecting over WiFi on fiber, ADSL. It doesn't seem to help much if I'm using a laptop or my phone. The country also isn't a pattern to this. The only thing that works reliably is old style mobile phone calls. Mobile to mobile with VoIP in the middle tends to be more reliable but I've had trouble with this too. All kinds of errors - disconnects, garble, buffering. In the case of argentina I also had other people on the line. It's just weird. This has been affecting my ability to call loved ones for years now and it really annoying me. It's not as back as it was thankfully but it still causes problems sometimes.
"Am I being paranoid."
Yes, no idea what the explanation is, but the NSA would be extremely low on my list.
What I'd personally do, which may not work for someone used to interpreting these kinds of results, is:
1) find a simple way to reproduce the problem on a laptop. (Could be "navigate to google drive in your browser")
2) install "wireshark" on the laptop, and start it sniffing your wifi connection (assuming that's what you're using)
3) run your reproducer.
4) stop the wireshark capture and look at the results.
This will show every packet that went over wifi. You're looking for things like DNS or HTTP queries getting retried repeatedly without getting any response. Or tons of unrelated traffic. That may help figure out where the problem is.
Good luck.
posted by bfields at 7:52 AM on March 17, 2016 [5 favorites]
Yes, no idea what the explanation is, but the NSA would be extremely low on my list.
What I'd personally do, which may not work for someone used to interpreting these kinds of results, is:
1) find a simple way to reproduce the problem on a laptop. (Could be "navigate to google drive in your browser")
2) install "wireshark" on the laptop, and start it sniffing your wifi connection (assuming that's what you're using)
3) run your reproducer.
4) stop the wireshark capture and look at the results.
This will show every packet that went over wifi. You're looking for things like DNS or HTTP queries getting retried repeatedly without getting any response. Or tons of unrelated traffic. That may help figure out where the problem is.
Good luck.
posted by bfields at 7:52 AM on March 17, 2016 [5 favorites]
Use the developer tools and look at the network logs. See everything that gets downloaded per page. One particular common villian is adtracking analytic serving javascript. Any modern news site is loading at least a megabyte of this stuff for any simple page. Agencies are probably looking but they're not necessarily between you and your content. Like that slide with the smiley face (ssl removed here). It's possible but unlikely they are having any noticeable impact on speed. On android you can use the remote debugger to see what is occurring as well. Could even be javascript memory leaks causing slow down or recursive functions blocking the ui thread. Phone running out of memory.
posted by andendau at 11:57 PM on March 18, 2016
posted by andendau at 11:57 PM on March 18, 2016
I'm using a Mac Mini and use Firefox as browser. I'm finding Flash slows some Web sites down big time so generally disable it and found things speeding up nicely. Also if you're using Java make sure that is up to date always since it's such a security hazard.
Same for the iPhone. I often have to have Java disabled because, with some Web sites, it regularly crashes that POS Safari browser.
If Mac computer, make sure Permissions are up to date - use the disc utility. I also clean bloated caches from time to time.
posted by WinstonJulia at 1:19 AM on March 19, 2016
Same for the iPhone. I often have to have Java disabled because, with some Web sites, it regularly crashes that POS Safari browser.
If Mac computer, make sure Permissions are up to date - use the disc utility. I also clean bloated caches from time to time.
posted by WinstonJulia at 1:19 AM on March 19, 2016
Response by poster: Some great answers, thanks. Am learning all that stuff.
The thing that gets me is multiple VoIP services being typically more reliable on VPN though.
Still, question has been open for a while now so I'll close it
posted by jago25_98 at 11:20 AM on September 16, 2016
The thing that gets me is multiple VoIP services being typically more reliable on VPN though.
Still, question has been open for a while now so I'll close it
posted by jago25_98 at 11:20 AM on September 16, 2016
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AFAIK XKEYSCORE is a system for analysing data after it has been collected in bulk. There's no sense in singling you out when you arrive at a new AP, and somehow slowing that AP down for others (and incidentally alerting you to the snooping).
If you're having DNS issues though, giving namebench a whirl couldn't hurt.
That all said, given the caveats you've mentioned, the common issue seems to be your phone. So what kind of phone is it? Have you factory-reset it recently? Does it have a shitty DNS source specified?
posted by pompomtom at 9:37 PM on March 16, 2016 [4 favorites]