Internet wizards: what's up with this?

luvche21 thought this was worth mentioning said Thu, Apr 30th 2015 at 2:53am ET

I'm in Japan right now (p.s. you should totally be jealous), and my normal internet sites are hit and miss for loading super quickly or horribly horribly slowly.

A couple examples: when I purchase a song online, I can download it (7-8 mb) in maybe 20 seconds. Meh loads nice and quick. Youtube is the worst, and barely stream a video. Gmail is hit or miss for being slow or nice and quick. Using an incognito window in Chrome (ie, so that my wife can use my laptop without signing me out of all my things) seems to make everything even slower.

Any ideas on why some things are horribly slow?

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mce128 said Thu, Apr 30th 2015 at 4:00am ET:

Natto

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tinsami1 said Thu, Apr 30th 2015 at 4:25am ET:

Throttling may be happening. If you have a VPN account, see if things are hit and miss still with it running.

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amazonateit said Thu, Apr 30th 2015 at 9:53am ET:

welcome to the speed of light and your internet overlords. meh.com is faster than the speed of light! (actually not true they have their content stored in multiple places around the world on a CDN and relatively low in bandwidth costs.) Most sites that seem better for you are probably serving off of a CDN in the asia-pacific region whereas sites like youtube are probably serving you content stateside and could be throttled or simply being delivered poorly to you at your location causing lots of retransmits.

Try multiple server locations at speedtest.net and see if any locations are really bad. Also check out your results over at https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/# to see what your part of Japan normally sees.

Also, do send a postcard!

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