FAQ's: Why is my Internet connection slow?

Q: My Internet connection seems to be slow. How can I test where the problem is?

A: This can be a complicated problem, because there are so many things that can cause your Internet connection to seem slow. Like most troubleshooting, if you start from one end of the affected systems involved and work your way through to the other end, checking each along the way, you should find the problem.

The most common solution is that your network, somewhere between your computer and your Internet Service Provider's routers is slowing things down. One easy way to check that is to use a good ISP speed test page like Speakeasy's speed test page and perform some simple download/upload tests to the city nearest to your current location:

If the test numbers don't quite look right, your ISP could have a temporary problem, or they could just be failing to deliver the Internet bandwidth they promised you.

That performs sweeping tests between your computer and your ISP's routers, so if that's fine then that removes a lot of systems from possibly causing the problem. There are several more things to check if that is not the obvious problem.

Next, however, would be to check your computer's CPU or memory resources to make sure they are not being overtaxed, which is commonly interpreted as causing a slow Internet connection. Bring up your task or resource manager on your computer. Look at the process list and sort CPU usage from high to low to see if anything is possibly using more of the CPU than it should be. Also check memory indicators to make sure you have plenty of free memory and are not actually out of memory when the slowness occurs. "System Idle Process" in Windows should have 95+% of your CPU time at any time when you are not doing anything significant. Linux and Mac computers should similarly show 95+% idle at any time.

If that all looks fine, a "ping" or "traceroute" from the command prompt can help determine if there is one system causing the problem. Open your command prompt and type "ping", a space, and a common website like www.google.com, then press Enter. You will get a list of ping "replies" with the time it took for those replies to bounce back to you, usually in milliseconds (ms). By performing pings on the same site with the same computer from the same network, you should get a feel for what the time should be and see if things are generally slow. You can also substitute a known server IP or hostname for www.google.com to test more specific locations that may be slow for you.

> ping www.google.com

Ping www.l.google.com (74.125.19.147):
Reply from 74.125.19.147: time=15ms TTL=56
Reply from 74.125.19.147: time=18ms TTL=56
Reply from 74.125.19.147: time=14ms TTL=56
Reply from 74.125.19.147: time=17ms TTL=56

Running a "traceroute" from the command prompt with the same format ("traceroute www.google.com", for example), will give you similar ping information, but for each router along the way to the destination. Again, you can substitute another server IP or hostname for www.google.com if you are having problems with specific servers. If any system in the traceroute results is much slower (in response time, again in milliseconds) than the others, that system is often the source of your problem.

> traceroute www.google.com

traceroute to www.google.com (74.125.19.104), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets using UDP
1 [YourRouterHostname] ([YourRouterIP]) 0.822 ms   0.717 ms   0.496 ms
...
11 gige-g2-6.core1.sjc1.he.net (66.220.23.177) 4.802 ms   4.194 ms   13.166 ms
12 10gigabitethernet2-1.core1.sjc2.he.net (72.52.92.118) 12.785 ms   16.285 ms   11.719 ms
13 72.14.219.161 (72.14.219.161) 5.658 ms 66.160.128.114 (66.160.128.114) 5.430 ms 72.14.219.161 (72.14.219.161) 5.590 ms
14 216.239.49.168 (216.239.49.168) 6.806 ms   6.323 ms   5.875 ms
15 209.85.249.30 (209.85.249.30) 10.117 ms 209.85.251.94 (209.85.251.94) 18.042 ms   12.123 ms
16 nuq04s01-in-f104.1e100.net (74.125.19.104) 7.215 ms   8.117 ms   6.761 ms

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