Weird Google problem

[RMerlin]

When you experience slowdowns, open your browser console, and see which specific HTTP request is being blocked/slowed down.

 

[Rik Stigter]

When you experience slowdowns, open your browser console, and see which specific HTTP request is being blocked/slowed down.

Great idea! Why oh why hadn't I thought of that?

 

[Mutzli]

Tertiary test-results:

1. With Diversion installed Google gets really slow after the (in-)famous 2-4 hour period. Uninstalled Diversion
2. Went back to basic config, so removed Skynet as well

The only thing left is the Swap-file, all other amtm-adaptations are now gone. Will keep this running for a while. After reboot everything is up to speed once again. But for how long?

PS. I do check log-files but until now they haven't told me anything useful.

Do you have any countries blocked in Skynet? I had issues like that with Hulu and other sites because some authoritative DNS server got banned.

 

[Rik Stigter]

Do you have any countries blocked in Skynet? I had issues like that with Hulu and other sites because some authoritative DNS server got banned.

No, no countries blocked.

 

[Mutzli]

No, no countries blocked.

Are the issues gone when you restart your router?

 

[Rik Stigter]

Are the issues gone when you restart your router?

Very temporarily (2-4 hours on average)

 

[Rik Stigter]

Update nr. four:

1. A clean config (nothing except a swap-file of 2 GB) appears to be stable over a longer period (> 12 hr.)
2. My Nokia 8 still has connectivity problems, but I suspect that has nothing to do with the problem we are experimenting for (have turned off all beam-forming for now)
   
3. Will install unbound, without ad-blocking

Testing...

 

[Rik Stigter]

Result!

When I try to load news.google.nl (which is https://news.google.com/?hl=nl&gl=NL&ceid=NL:nl) the biggest hiccups on the main page are loading fonts from fonts.gstatic.com. This appears to be taking between 20000 ms and > 100000 ms! On average something like 40000ms, which is way too slow to be comfortable when reading. Another one is lh3.googleusercontent.com, which loads stuff like my picture.
Mind you, this is when I disable the cache in the browser console, but even when I allow for caching it is extremely slow. So slow in fact that the page-result often is 'Cannot Connect'. Refresh a couple of times and the page appears, but this is in no way acceptable.

Conclusion: there is a DNS problem here. Thank you @ColinTaylor! Now I'll revert to the situation before I installed UnBound to see whether the problem disappears. It does.
It does but news.google.com still is pretty cranky, that is: it doesn't load the whole page every time. More digging necessary...

 

[Rik Stigter]

----snap----

My ISP is showing an interest and they are sending me a new modem (well: router in bridge mode) which will arrive in a day or two. They even know about merlin-firmware (Hooray! Miracles do happen) and started looking at these pages when I called (even better). But they didn't come up with any better ideas than that, I'm afraid.

What is it that I'm overlooking?

I have a big confession to make: My ISP was right. A new modem seems to solve the issues.

Now one may ask why they weren't sure of that themselves. You'd think they could see how my old modem was performing and that there was something wrong with it. If they did they didn't tell me. But I'm not complaining: all of a sudden I get the snappy responses that I craved for. DNS (My ISP's DNS is supposed to be crap, but right now it shines!), websites, all of it.

So, I'm going to reinstate all those nice features, step by step, that I'm used to have from Merlin-firmware, beginning with some privacy (DNSSEC, DoT). If that runs OK for an hour or so I'll add Diversion, Skynet, maybe even UnBound (well: that can wait a bit, or even a bit longer ).

Now some theorizing: why was only Google affected as much as it was? The news.google.com pages are pretty complex as they tend to do a lot of requests of various parts of the Google infrastructure but also of all kinds of news-agencies they link to ('looking under the bonnet' was an excellent idea by @RMerlin). If one has a -more or less spurious- connection issue that might explain why Google was affected more than all other websites. But that is a lot of surmising and I have no way (or willingness) to test all these things right now. I do know that my testing of DNS-reponsiveness (with GRC's 'DNSBench' and with Google's 'namebench') was on the right track (I hadn't mentioned all this in my original posting in an effort to keep it short(-ish)). What took me by surprise was the strange fact that the problem always took some time to develop, but I can think of several potential reasons for that. Right now I'll leave it at that. I'm going to relax after about two months of ire, testing and more ire!

I'd like to thank everybody who contributed to this thread. It sure makes a difference if you sense you'r not alone!