get_iplayer suddenly relatively slow

[Christian Hewitt]

On 27 Jun 2011, at 21:34, Clive wrote:

[snip]

> Same experiences here and I'm on Virgin Media 20MB out of Coventry, and Windows Vista, though 32 bit. Some nights, when I have d/l nothing, speed is sooo sloooowww that I often give up and try the following night - and then it runs like a train. For me, late afternoon is slow (kids home from school?) and early evening. Mid-evening and well into the night is generally OK.
> 
> So, no help from me, but just recognition that I think the logjam is elsewhere. Now, where, is almost impossible to find out, though I think there are tracer applications which can time each leg of the route so that might give you a hint of where the problem is.

I'm happily retrieving Top Gear at ~2.2MB/sec so it's definitely not something involving the BBC (which is only used to discover the stream URLs) or CDN networks (who are paid mega$ to ensure their end is hugely available and rarely congested). That reduces the likely scope to congestion or active traffic management in a network that your traffic is routing through. Most ISPs, especially large ones, will have direct peering and interconnect arrangements with the CDN providers so unless your ISP has a persistent network issue that causes traffic to route the-long-way it's most likely to be traffic shaping. Of course, there's always the possibility that Vista has decided to fubar (it's not unheard of) and since its popular (in the multiple people using it sense, most people seem to hate it) it's not impossible that more than one person is having a "software quality" issue at the same time, and not network issues. I'd put my money on the ISP though..