Ubuntu

very poor download speeds

Asked by freeulster

I have very poor download speeds with Ubuntu, fiesty and gutsy. I am on a lan with a router connected to a DSL line. I have both wired and wifi accessability. I have never gotten better than 33.9 kb/s an ususally lower, all the way down to 670 b/s. I have set software source to find best site. My speeds are terrible. Right now my update download is stalled. This is not acceptable, please help. I looked through the forums and this seems VERY common yet no one has any answers.

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Christoph Langner
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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#1

I should note that only file downloads seem to be effected. I can browse and open web pages normally, just can't download. My updates that should take 45 minutes are now going into their second day and running at 726 b/s and with an estimated finish time of 2 days 1 hour and 43 minutes.

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Christoph Langner (chrissss) said : 		#2

What do you use to surf the net? What kind of hardware?

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#3

my wired is an nForce2 ethernet integrated into the mother board
my wireless card is a microsoft wifi pci card 802.11b

I connect to an actiontec gt704wg router/dsl/wifi.

I am currently using the wired connections but get the same slow speeds with wireless.

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#4

the mother board is an ASUS A7N8X.

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#5

wireless is Microsoft Wireless PCI Adapter MN-730 BUT i primarily use the wired for speed.

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Wrwrwr (wrwrwr) said : 		#6

Does it happen only with updates or when downloading any files from the internet, with e.g. firefox or some ftp client?

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#7

It happens with all downloads from any site, not just updates. I tried to download files from tucows.com and others and the results are the same, very poor speeds. This is also the case on my Fujitsu pseries laptop which is also running Ubuntu 7.10.

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#8

Any Ideas? I'm at a lost. I really like Ubuntu but this can be a deal breaker.

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Wrwrwr (wrwrwr) said : 		#9

When it stalls are you sure that transfer is taking place at all, or it's just average falling and there is no transfer for long? (You may use some network monitor or even ifconfig.)

Maybe some errors appear in dmesg or another system log, maybe you can find there some warnings about your card, warnings related to acpi?

An even better way to debug this would be to do a packet capture (with e.g. wireshark).

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#10

It isn't stalling so much as incredibly slow, we're talking glacial speeds. It took 2 days to download the iso of 7.10. Both of my Ubuntu computers are this way. I am using a wired lan connection on each to a dsl router/modem listed earlier. I am getting as low as 400 BITS per second, not kilobytes or megabytes but bits. At best I get nearly 40 kb/s. I should just plug in an old 33.6 modem and save the money I am spending on DSL. My connection information shows 100mb/s card. I am getting angry.

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Best Christoph Langner (chrissss) said : 		#11

Can you double check this with a windows computer?

1) Your computer is not responsible for connecting to the internet. You said, you are using a hardware router. So this router connects your network to the internet. Ubuntu uses the router to send and recieve data from/into the net.
2) You've got the same problem on two different computers.

Ergo i doubt that this is connected to ubuntu

1) Check your cables
2) Check with a third pc and perhabs windows if it is still slow
3) Check at which rate you can exchange data between the computers inside your lan

CU
Christoph

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#12

Well I reset my modem/router and now am getting 197 kb/s. I am much happier, thanks all and thanks Christoph.

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freeulster (kentdonnelly) said : 		#13

Thanks Christoph Langner, that solved my question.