Help with internet traffic problems between the U.S. and Asia.

September 11, 2007 5:25 PM

Can anyone explain the apparent internet traffic problems my client's customers are seeing in Asia?

I do some work for a company on the east coast of the United States. They run a commercial web site and have customers all over the world. For the past two weeks, we are being bombarded with complaints from clients in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong. People in Europe and North and South America apparently have no real problems.

Mostly I see screenshots from Internet Explorer showing timeouts fetching the web site. Ping times are generally between 175 and 300 ms, which doesn't seem all that bad for data crossing the planet. I've seen no packet loss from any of the screen captures of clients pinging us. They have a T1 through Cavalier Telephone and a DSL line via Verizon. Customers have the same problems with both.

Does anyone know of anything that's happened recently that might explain this? I've tried a few web sites, like internettrafficreport.com and haven't seen much to explain it.

Otherwise, does anyone have any suggestions (outside of the obvious colocation one) of what we can do to increase performance for our Asian customers?

posted by mragreeable to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Sorry, one other thing - I probably was too dismissive of the colocation option above. If you know of good colocation providers in the region, or with fast connections to the region, I'd also love to hear about it. Thanks much.
posted by mragreeable at 5:37 PM on September 11, 2007

Honestly, I can't recommend JP colocation highly enough (or at least Asia market located) -- I work for a fairly big web company, and have servers in two NA locations, one Euopean location and Japan...and the latency and connection issues between US and Japan just to monitor the machines is terrible and always has been, yet the folks in-market don't have an issue.
posted by davejay at 11:24 PM on September 11, 2007

Seeing as you're not getting many answers I'll put in what little I know. Firstly if you have a system which has 'heavy' content (photos/movies etc) and/or is characterised by times when activity is significantly higher than others I believe the way to go is to take the 'heavy' content and offload it to a service like Akamai who are able to host your content in a widely distributed set of servers and which results in your users in say, Japan, getting served their images from a server much nearer Japan than the East Coast of the states.


On a completely different front I would be tempted to get tame user from suffering region to hit web server at known time from known IP address. Look in web log see if anything appears (unlikely given your description but it would eliminate the 'script says do this [extremely inefficient] database lookup for all asian customers' type scenario).

Another thing could you get one of the users to :

telnet yoursite.com 80

... I'm just wondering whether there's some badly configured cache between you and them - I think the telnet, even on port 80, will cut through that.
posted by southof40 at 4:56 AM on September 12, 2007