New Jersey CDN/Fios Cache Hangs

[DrTachyon]

I'm having a weird issue and wanted to see if anyone else is.

Certain sites just hang, mainly it's the CDNs for that site; Google (gstatic, api) Amazon (Anything cloudfront), and various other CDNs, and annoyingly enough the Verizon site as well. I have to refresh to just get it to load sometimes.

The weirdest part is Pinging/Traceroute, even when it's stalled, shows no issue. They respond fine with no dropped packets.

I've already done the whole reboot router, reboot ONT. I've reset router to defaults etc..etc.., I still occasionally, randomly get this hang.

This issue persists on two different PCs (1 XP, 1 Win7) and an Android phone.

I feel as if I've ruled out anything on my end when I used a VPN without zero issues. None of those sites were stalling.

And the thing is, my internet speed is fine. Connections to sites that work without issue (Steam for example) have my normal speed without any stalling.

I'm at a loss. If this was a larger outage I thought I would have seen some mention of it, but I don't see anything...but at the same time I can't find any reason why it would be anything on my side.

[smith6612]

If you haven't already, try changing your DNS Servers to see if you can either catch some different servers on the CDN side, or if it's slow lookups which are causing the hangs to occur.

I can't say I've noticed this problem in Western NY.

[DrTachyon]

I tried Google DNS as an alternative, same issues.

In fact they just sent me a new router as well thinking it might be that. Same thing. I have yet to try directly plugging in to the ONT with Ethernet cable (I have no cable long enough/no laptop to test with)

It's very odd...Ping requests to these servers that hang work fine, no dropped packets. It's only when I'm surfing the web, certain CDNs.

Like right now, as I type this the page hasn't fully loaded (Waiting for vrzn.i.lithium.com) but refresh/reload the page and it'll load just fine (Maybe after a couple of tries).

Any ideas what else I could do to test to try and figure it out? So far the only time I've NOT had any issue was connecting through a VPN, but that's not viable for normal everyday.

And currently it's only the following sites/servers:

• Google/Associated products (API/Fonts)
• Verizon (website, Fios tv mobile app doesn't load at all, just hangs, edgecast CDN)
• Amazon (Cloudfront CDN)
• deviantArt (which has stuff hosted on Amazon cloudfront)
• Wordpress.org (Anytime I go looking up anything in their codex)

[JustinG1]

This really is a strange incident.

Are you using the same browser on all devices? The problem seems client-side but if you say its the same thing on different devices with different DNS servers... hmm.

Where did you set Google DNS servers? On the PCs or in the router config? It can be helpful sometimes to double check that it is set correctly, which can be done by going to https://www.dnsleaktest.com/

I wish I could be more help

[DrTachyon]

Tell me about it, it's been going on for ~2 weeks, figured it'd clear it self up. I set the DNS through the PC at the time and tested it using nslookup. So as far as I could tell It was using Googles DNS. I've tried it in Firefox, Chrome, even IE on a WinXP PC, Win7 PC, and Android (KitKat) Phone (Firefox Mobile) All of them run into the same issue.

[DrTachyon · Accepted solution]

Figured it out....Sorta.

I had to lower the MTU down below 1500. I'm not sure why all of a sudden I have to, I've been at 1500 since I've gotten fios, but now...Anything lower than 1500 seems to work fine.

[smith6612]

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@DrTachyon wrote:

Figured it out....Sorta.

I had to lower the MTU down below 1500. I'm not sure why all of a sudden I have to, I've been at 1500 since I've gotten fios, but now...Anything lower than 1500 seems to work fine.

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Believe it or not, this sort of an issue has been discovered before. This was in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and many customers had to drop their MTU down to something such as 1472. Turns out the problem in that case boiled down to be with Verizon's network not correctly passing traffic. 

If you can find other customers with similar issues, let's get some IP addresses, Traceroutes, and reports going. This place, along with support, are the two places that should be notified.