All UK Servers Slow Download<->Upload

[kbps 29]

All UK servers are very slow on download 3.5 Mbps but normal on upload (over 600 Mbps for me).  If I connect to the Netherlands then download speeds return to normal.
EDIT BY STAFF: as of 09-Sep-24 user reports the opposite (normal on download, slow on upload).

[Frozzeled 0]

Experiencing the same situation.

[Staff 9968]

Hello!

Very odd that you both have normal download speed on the Netherlands servers and very poor on UK servers. All the VPN servers share the same configuration and the load in UK and NL is highly similar. We would rule out a peering problem, otherwise you would see bad upload speed too on the UK servers. Can you also provide additional information such as your Operating System name and version, how you connect to the servers (WireGuard, OpenVPN UDP, OpenVPN TCP...) and (in private if you prefer so) your ISP?

Kind regards
 

[Frozzeled 0]

Window 10 Version    10.0.19045 Build 19045
Connect via Open VPN UDP
ISP Zen Internet.

Connected to UK server Naos, DL is 18Mbps, connect to a server in NL, DL is back to 300Mbps


 

[kbps 29]

6 hours ago, Staff said:

Hello!

Very odd that you both have normal download speed on the Netherlands servers and very poor on UK servers. All the VPN servers share the same configuration and the load in UK and NL is highly similar. We would rule out a peering problem, otherwise you would see bad upload speed too on the UK servers. Can you also provide additional information such as your Operating System name and version, how you connect to the servers (WireGuard, OpenVPN UDP, OpenVPN TCP...) and (in private if you prefer so) your ISP?

Kind regards
 

Experiencing the same issue again this evening.  A little more digging and it seems to be an M247 issue that is also present for me in other countries.

M247 London

M247 Belgium

however Global layer in Netherlands

Gobal layer Netherlands

I am using Linux Mint 21#, Eddie 2.21.8, WireGuard Protocol.  I have tried changing the entry ports, but this makes no difference to results.

Forgot to mention.  This is a peak time issue.  In the morning, I have excellent speeds on the UK M247 servers.  Is all I can think is M247 are limiting the traffic in some way at peak times.

M247 London - Morning Time

  Edited ... by kbps
fix image links, add time of day update

[Staff 9968]

12 hours ago, kbps said:

Is all I can think is M247 are limiting the traffic in some way at peak times.

Hello!

While this idea came to our mind too, although it's not anywhere in the contractual agreement, we probably have to rule it out as well, because in peak times you still have more than 600 Mbit/s in upload, which for the server means receiving 600 Mbit/s and sending out (virtually at the same time) 600 Mbit/s, so neither the incoming nor the outgoing bandwidth suffers congestion. However when you download you have very poor speed. although for the server the operation is "symmetric" to the previous one, it requires exactly the same bandwidth both in and out. So we have thought about a congestion in your network, but that's also to be ruled out otherwise you would have poor performance on the NL servers too. The only remaining and realistic option on congestion considerations we can think of is that some transit node in between you and M247 is congested on peak times and only on one direction. We will perform additional tests in an attempt to understand the possible cause of the problem.

Kind regards
 

[Frozzeled 0]

Speeds appear back to normal for me today on UK servers.

[kbps 29]

43 minutes ago, Frozzeled said:

Speeds appear back to normal for me today on UK servers

M247 London Am

Check later on at peak times.  It's always good for me in the morning. Today however my ping has massively improved to London servers from about 12ms down to 6ms.  Manchester is still at around 12ms.

I can also confirm that I am using a different ISP to you that to as far as I know are in no way related (parent company, etc). So we should be both using different routing paths to reach M247s data centres.

[Atien 0]

Speeds are also quite slow for me compared to Netherland servers, on Manchester servers I get about 30-50 Mb down, and on London I get around 125 down, and on NL i get 200+

[kbps 29]

Looking like the servers are back to normal now.

m247 London - Normal

@Staff Not sure if you have done anything behind the scenes, but thanks for looking into the issue.  If you do find out what the problem was, could you update us.  I am always interested in the technical aspects. 
 

[Staff 9968]

11 hours ago, kbps said:

Looking like the servers are back to normal now.

m247 London - Normal

@Staff Not sure if you have done anything behind the scenes, but thanks for looking into the issue.  If you do find out what the problem was, could you update us.  I am always interested in the technical aspects. 
 

Hello!

We could not reproduce the problem in any time period of the day in the last 4 days, when this thread started, thus we could not and did not do anything. Glad to know that it's back to normal for you, we'll keep an eye on it.

Kind regards

 

[kbps 29]

@StaffIssues with M247 at peak times are back again.

London M247 = Slow download but fast Upload
Belgium M247 = Slow upload but fast download
Netherlands Global Layer = fast download, upload a bit slow but that is probably just server load in peak times.
 

[rabbit 0]

I've also been experiencing this regularly. M247 are doing some rate limiting

[kbps 29]

Bad now even not in peak time

https://www.speedtest.net/result/15843098583.png

33 Down
643 Up

@Staff Please could a second provider be added in the UK, even if its only one or two servers.

Minutes later and the Up speed has also dropped

7 Down
26 Up

https://www.speedtest.net/result/15843121450.png

Edited ... by kbps
second test

[Staff 9968]

@kbps
@rabbit

Hello!

As promised we monitored the UK servers but again we did not notice any anomaly. This is what we see in the worst conditions, during peak times, from a variety of datacenters in Europe (connection through WireGuard, OS Linux or FreeBSD) to the servers in UK:



More or less it's the same on all servers, during peak times. We see more than decent throughput and no significant asymmetry between upload and download.
Maybe it's a problem only with peering with some ISP. We publish this not to rule out the option to have another provider in the UK, but just to show that according to our tests and monitoring there is no capping or congestion on the M247 side.

@Atien

That's not surprising, because the NL servers lines go directly to AMS-IX, so the probability that any other server in Europe can seriously compete with them while having connections from a residential ISP is moderate.

Kind regards






 

[kbps 29]

Thanks for investigating @Staff


I did some further troubleshooting of my own.  I have a Mullvad account who also use M247 as well as Xtom and 31173 as providers in the UK.

The image shows five speed tests at a time when i was experiencing very slow speeds using M247 Air.
23:10 and 23:18 = Air M247
23:21, 23:23 and 23:27 = Mullvad.
As you can see M247 on Mullvad worked flawlessly and Mullvad's 31137 Owned servers were exceptional.  Look at that ping time!

I hope this helps with further investigation.
 

[Staff 9968]

@kbps

Thank you. Very puzzling, we can just confirm that from our testing lines in Holland and Italy the performance we get while connected to UK M247 servers is very similar to the best performance you got on the screenshot you sent us. We use WIreGuard with 1320 bytes MTU.

Mullvad software forces 1280 bytes, please try with 1280 bytes MTU when you connect to our servers too. To change MTU in Eddie Desktop edition (2.23.2 or higher version required) open the "Preferences" > "WireGuard" window. If you use WireGuard configuration file, please edit it with any text editor and add in the [Interface] section the following line:

MTU = 1280

Test also bigger MTU up to 1400 bytes.

Kind regards
 

[rabbit 0]

Thanks for the investigation. I use a GL.iNet router for connecting so I'll make some custom configs later to test with an updated MTU. The Irish M247 seems to never have issues so I use this as a fallback currently.

[kbps 29]

I am using Linux Eddie version 2.21.8.  Is there a way to change the MTU in this version?

[Staff 9968]

1 hour ago, kbps said:

I am using Linux Eddie version 2.21.8.  Is there a way to change the MTU in this version?

Hello!

Unfortunately not, you need Eddie 2.23.2 or higher version.

Kind regards
 

[kbps 29]

Thought that I would give an update and my personal solution.

The M247 servers were continuing to give me problems.  They would be fine for days or hours, then all of a sudden, websites would take ages to load and speeds would drop.  This would occur randomly.  This would resolve after a few minutes.  Probably happening more often, but of course I only noticed when I was at the machine.  Speed tests show the speed high to start off with and then the speed would gradually drop as though the server (m247) was either suddenly overloaded or there was some kind of rate limiting going on.

For the last month I have been using Netherlands servers.  I am seeing none of the problems mentioned above.  My ping times to the Netherlands servers are generally lower than UK servers too. 10 or 11 ms compared to about 20 ms.  Websites feel faster to load and I am getting consistent results on speed tests no matter what time of day.

I do not know what is wrong with the M247 servers.  It seems to coincide when they moved data centre last year.  My guess would be that it was bad peering with my ISP but @Frozzeled was experiencing issues too, who is using a completely different ISP to me.  My suspicion is that there is some kind of rate limiting happening somewhere in M247's network.  I don't think that it is intentional, probably something misconfigured somewhere.  Again if there were another provider in the UK I could do a like for like comparison, but unfortunately there isn't.  For now I will be sticking with the Netherlands until Eddie 2.23.2 or higher is stable and I can try the MTU change.

[kbps 29]

Looks like the M247 issue is back again

M247 London - 759 down 4 up Ping 24

Global layer Amsterdam - 602 down 452 up Ping 11

 

[Staff 9968]

Hello,

two maintenance works in London are planned to upgrade network. This is the announcement we recently received from M247.
 

Quote

 

From: Wednesday, 4 September, 2024, 04:00 UTC
To: Wednesday, 4 September, 2024, 07:00 UTC

From: Thursday, 5 September, 2024, 04:00 UTC
To: Thursday, 5 September, 2024, 07:00 UTC

The works consist in upgrading the firmware of the backbone routers, part of the global network upgrade plan.
You can encounter traffic re-routes and temporary packet loss while the works are performed.

Not only the services in UK will be affected, but the services outside of UK will feel a lower impact as the traffic can in most cases be re-routed via other paths.

We do not expect the downtime to be as long as the entire maintenance window.

 

Kind regards
 

[Staff 9968]

Hello!

The maintenance work in UK is over. Do you notice any improvement? We see a good performance from Italy and a few countries in Europe. After the maintenance/upgrade a UK server has also reached the Top 10 (!) user speed with 631 Mbit/ to a single client.



Kind regards

[kbps 29]

@Staff Unfortunately not.

Ping times




Speed test on M247.  Very slow upload.





For comparison I tried fast.com just in-case it was an issue with speedtest.  As you can see the upload is still very slow.






And for reference what my connection can do, I ran a speedtest directly from my home connection to m247 speedtest server.





As you can see there is no issue connecting to and using m247 infrastructure directly, but as soon as I am using the VPN connection through m247 there is congestion.  When I run a speedtest the upload chart graphic speed will start high, but then rapidly drop down to the speeds that you see in here.

One question, could any of this be caused my bad ipv6.  My home connection is only ipv4.  However, as I have stated before I do not have issues with other providers such as global layer in the Netherlands.