Need help with my Interwebs connection

Nao

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Need help with my Interwebs connection
« on November 28th, 2012, 11:12 AM »
Okay, this isn't something I usually do... But I'm pretty much stuck these days.

Ever since I bought my new machine (running Windows 7) last year, or possibly more recently than that, I've been having Internet connection problems.

It all just adds up to this: if I'm sending too many HTTP REQUESTS, they're being DENIED.

An example: I'm loading a torrent file. Many requests, I guess. After a while, if I'm trying to browse the web, I'll get a generic error saying there's no connection available. Usually, doing a manual ping on wedge.org will work, doing a ping on a more obscure website will work so I guess the DNS is working...

Another example: forget about torrents, let's say I'm simply online with no download in progress. Launching Opera or Chrome or Firefox with hundreds of tabs in them. Chrome will still attempt to load its 500+ tabs immediately and miserably fails. Firefox is okay because it only loads tabs when you activate them. Opera is 'smarter' about it and load only a few tabs at a time, but it doesn't change the fact that after it's loaded a dozen tabs or so, the rest sends me network error messages.

One thing that's even sillier is that if I'm downloading a large file through HTTP (in my browser), and then I launch a series of requests that crashes my connection, the large file will STILL keep downloading. In fact, any ongoing requests are still being honored, it's only the new requests that fail and send a network error.

After months of pesting against this, and having to reboot my modem before I can resume my load, I discovered that I could simply unplug my Ethernet cable. After a few hours I tried deactivating the Ethernet connection from my network settings in Windows 7, and then immediately reactivating it. To my surprise, it actually worked.

So, so far so good... "My network card is faulty."
It just so happens that I have a second Ethernet port in my computer... Okay, so I'll just use it, right?
Wrong. I've got *exactly* the same problem on it. It works in the beginning, and then fails miserably until I do the deactivate/activate combo trick on it. Then I can 'reload' more tabs until it crashes again, I do the trick again, I manually reload more tabs, etc, etc...

Still, it's not 'normal'. Considering that both network cards do it, it's probably not a hardware failure -- rather a crappy setting in Windows 7 or something that does flood control.

But I have yet to find out who the culprit is. And it drives me crazy because, well, I realize it's one of the things that makes me spend less time loading websites and more time watching films. It's not good for Wedge.

If anyone out there is a network specialist, please help. :)
Posted: November 28th, 2012, 10:58 AM

I feel I should also point out that browsing my local Apache install works even when the network is failing. So it tends to conflict with the idea that the problem happens *before* the request reaches the network card...
Annoying, no?

nolsilang

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Nao

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Re: Need help with my Interwebs connection
« Reply #2, on November 29th, 2012, 01:18 AM »
I don't see this setting..?

Also, the help file mentions an error I should be getting in the log. I don't have it ;-(

live627

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Nao

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Re: Need help with my Interwebs connection
« Reply #4, on November 29th, 2012, 01:52 AM »
I don't have wifi in my PC, and a USB dongle didn't help much -- couldn't get it to work properly, really. Plus, wifi = anyone can hack into my network communications.
So for now, I'm stuck with Ethernet...

pgordemer

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Re: Need help with my Interwebs connection
« Reply #5, on November 29th, 2012, 04:26 AM »
I see this with many home routers as the NAT table gets full. P2P many times on routers can fill the table with the number of open connections. Some routers are better than others at it.

You know the true definition of inovators - they are the ones with the arrows in their backs.

Nao

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Re: Need help with my Interwebs connection
« Reply #6, on November 29th, 2012, 10:43 AM »
I never got this problem with my old Windows XP PC... Even though I used even more tabs than on this one. (Reason being --- Opera 8-11 had support for WAY more tabs than Opera 12 which is a bitch when it comes to tab memory... So I had on average 900 tabs running on a 2GB computer, while now I can only get at most 500 tabs on an 8GB computer now...)

Anyway, also, I can easily connect to the web through my iPod or my girlfriend's laptop so it's really not a modem/router issue. As I said, it's in my computer (or OS), and it's probably (not 100% positive though) a software setting gone wrong... (Or a driver setting.)


Pandos

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live627

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nolsilang

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Nao

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Re: Need help with my Interwebs connection
« Reply #12, on January 20th, 2013, 12:13 AM »
Sorry, I let go of this topic... I guess it hurt too much ;)

It's still a problem, and still a mystery to me. It isn't a TCP IP packet size thingy, it probably even isn't a TCP IP problem at all because of one of the things I explained (having my network down doesn't prevent a large file from downloading, meaning packet exchange between the server and my router continues happily.)

On a positive note, today I finally managed to launch a movie file from my S3 (where I downloaded it) to my PopCorn Hour media player through streaming... I think it's the first time I ever managed to do something like that, ie not using my USB drive on it :P