bad latency when connected to certain AirVPN servers

[dajasc 0]

I have several computers (and game systems) on my LAN.  Most are not connected to any AirVPN server.  If I connect one of my computers to an Air server in the Netherlands, it does not seem to matter which one, and try to download torrents all of the other devices on my LAN start to experience very bad latency.  The ping goes from 50 ms to 500 ms to sites like yahoo and google.  If I stop torrenting everything goes back to being fine.

 

I thought possibly I am saturating my connection to my ISP.  That is not close to being the case, it is less than 10% of my normal connection speed, and it is really low - 1 Mbs.  If instead of connecting to an Air server in the Netherlands I connect to one in Canada I get 4 Mbs and all of my other devices go back to 50 ms ping even though I am downloading faster and connected to the same number of peers.  I don't live in Canada or the Netherlands.

 

Connections to the Air servers are on linux machines using UDP (TCP didn't make any difference).  The Netherlands is furhter and so I can accept that it is slower and there are dropped packets etc., but how is it affecting latency for devices that are not connected to the VPN?

 

[Guest]

I have several computers (and game systems) on my LAN.  Most are not connected to any AirVPN server.  If I connect one of my computers to an Air server in the Netherlands, it does not seem to matter which one, and try to download torrents all of the other devices on my LAN start to experience very bad latency.  The ping goes from 50 ms to 500 ms to sites like yahoo and google.  If I stop torrenting everything goes back to being fine.

 

I thought possibly I am saturating my connection to my ISP.  That is not close to being the case, it is less than 10% of my normal connection speed, and it is really low - 1 Mbs.  If instead of connecting to an Air server in the Netherlands I connect to one in Canada I get 4 Mbs and all of my other devices go back to 50 ms ping even though I am downloading faster and connected to the same number of peers.  I don't live in Canada or the Netherlands.

 

Connections to the Air servers are on linux machines using UDP (TCP didn't make any difference).  The Netherlands is furhter and so I can accept that it is slower and there are dropped packets etc., but how is it affecting latency for devices that are not connected to the VPN?

 

When you connect to air servers, the traffic between you and the netherlands servers is 5 times larger than when you aren't connected because it is encrypted, since you are further away it's highly likely your router is working overtime to try and compensate including your ISP, bandwidth limits is a thing lol

[dajasc 0]

How is it different when it is connected to the Netherlands or connected to Canada?  I see no disruption at all to the rest of my LAN (the not connected to AirVPN part) when a single computer is connected to Air servers in Canada even though the throughput is much higher than when a single one is connected to an Air server in the Netherlands. 

 

It is definitely not throttling by the ISP unless they particularly hate every server in the Netherlands and no where else.  Also, my router isn't encrypting anything, just the computer that is connecting to the Air servers are encrypting it.  Even if it was, the router is an Ivy Bridge generation PC, it's CPU never gets to 10%.  Even the PC doing the encryption is not heavily loaded.  But who cares about that PC, I am saying the rest of the LAN can barely communicate with the internet if I have a slow, sad, connection to the Netherlands through Air servers with one PC.

[Khariz 109]

When your computer is connected to the Netherlands (presumably from the united states), you have an always open, constant data transfer from your computer, and thus up your ISP IP, to the Netherlands with a ping of at least 130-180ms at all times. That tunnel, is always open while you are connected, talking back and forth. Your computer, and thus your router, and thus your connection to your ISP is facilitating that transfer, albeit through an encrypted tunnel.

 

The only way to know what is going on for sure is to know how your ISP is handling your connection on their end. There is different ways they can route data. If they are routing it all in a simultaneous fashion (not going to get more technical for the time being), it is possible that your highest latency connection is dragging down the others (this would be highly unusual though).

 

It shouldn't be happening at your router level unless you have some odd routing rules going on. If you have QoS preferring web traffic or something, you may want to stop that feature and see if it helps. In fact, disable QoS entirely if you are using it.

[dajasc 0]

Ok, I have a little more information. 

 

 - when one computer is just connected to an Air server in the Netherlands just doing light web browsing, nothing changes for the pings on the rest of the network to various internet servers

- when you use the connected to Netherlands computer to download a big file that saturates the connection to the Air server (but still no where close to saturating the connection to my local ISP), latency for the rest of the computers not connected to the Air server remains good - still 50 ms pings

- as soon as you try and start torrents, literally within seconds, the ping for the other computers not connected to the Air server become hundreds of ms even though the upload and download speeds for the torrents are terrible - less than 1 Mb/s up and down.

 

If you do all of those things with the computer connected to an Air server in Canada instead of one in the Netherlands all of the ping times for the rest of the computers on the network never change, even though the upload and download speeds for the torrents are 4X faster.

[Khariz 109]

Yeah, I'm not seeing anything unusual.  You are having your network connection ping perhaps hundreds of peers, via the Netherlands, all while attempting to do other things. 

 

There are experiments you can do in order to observe the same phenomenon.  Here's a easy one to perform:  Download a copy of Counterstrike:Global Offense on steam.  Start checking your latency on all the other computers in your house.  Fire up the game, and start acquiring the community server list.  You will literally be pinging tens of thousands of servers at once, and during that ping period, your whole internet connection will be garbage (particularly because of the servers that cause latency when you ping them).  When it stops, it should normalize.

 

Try lowering the number of peers in your torrent client.  Or try turning DHT off.

[OpenSourcerer 1441]

I see something. Would you please post your (torrent client connection) configuration? All of those:

• Your internet connection speed in MBit/s, for example 10/1 (10 MBit/s download, 1 MBit/s upload)
• Speed limit download and upload, for example no limit download, 100 kB/s upload
• Max global connections
• Max connections per torrent
• Max global upload slots
• Max upload slots per torrent
• Max active torrents
• Max torrents downloading

[dajasc 0]

Khariz, that doesn't seem to explain why doing the same thing (more really) while a single computer is connected to a server in Canada doesn't cause the others, not connected through VPN, to have bad latency and a single computer being connected in the Netherlands does.  I tried shutting off DHT, didn't help.  I tried increasing the number of peers when connected in Canada, didn't hurt.

 

There definitely is some variability in the problem.  Right now the non-connected computers have high (150 ms) latency even though I have a connection to the Netheralnds and bit torrent is active. Yesterday it was like a light switch, torrent anything through that Netherlands configuration and latency on everything went to 300-500+ ms, turn it off and latency recovered immediately.

 

Giganerd, configuration you asked for is:

 

16 Mbit/s down/4 Mbit/s up

no limits down/2 Mbit/s up

200 global connections

50 connections per torrent

I don't know what an upload slot is, I couldn't find that in the configuration

Max active torrents is usually 5 or 6 with only 2 or 3 actually downloading

The problem does occur even with only one active torrent if it has any significant upload or download.  By significant I mean about 150-200 Mbit/s up or down.  If connected in the Netherlands it never gets faster than that.

[dajasc 0]

sorry, I meant kbit/s up or down in that last line