Certain websites very slow after 8:30pm

[spamcity]

I have been dealing with a problem where some websites get very slow, every single night, around 8:30pm, while others seem to load just fine. During the day I have no issues at all but it happens like clockwork every night at 8:30pm

I have been googling and communicating with my ISP for over a week now and have not gotten any resolution.

I have noticed youtube, speedtest.net, and steam all giving me expected speeds (500mbps), while other sites such as twitch, speedof.me, and other various streaming sites will be very very slow. speedof.me usually shows single digit mbps after 8:30pm (but during the day shows the expected ~500mbps). I have used chrome, firefox, and edge and they all have the same issues.

I am wired into the router and have tried directly into the modem, with no difference. I have opened resource manager and I can verify that pages like youtube are in fact using hundreds of mbps if I ask them to (open tons of videos at once) and steam will download games ~500mbps, but if I try to download a file through a browser it downloads in kbps. A site like twitch will not go above 10 or 15mbps at night. Online games do not seem to be suffering any slow down.

I have flushed my dns, I have used other dns like google's, and 1.1.1.1 with no luck. It is happening every single night at around the same time, and as much as I want to blame the ISP, it baffles me that only certain sites seem to be affected by this and I don't know if it's even their fault anymore.

I'm coming here as a last resort after reading dozens of forum posts that don't seem to quite be the same issue as mine. If anyone can help shed some light on this issue I will be extremely grateful.

edit: Also I experience the same problem on another desktop, laptop, and our phones

 

[Alabalcho]

Do you have friends using same ISP? What they see about these websites?
What about friends using other ISPs?

It could be that your ISP has poor connectivity with some of backbones, and once everyone starts watching Netflix / playing games after work, this connection is overloaded.

 

[camieabz]

Two most likely causes are:

1) ISP throttling of streaming / video data

2) Local congestion, a.k.a. contention, either due to to neighbourhood demand, or on local network (i.e. in the house)

It's sometimes hard to ascertain which, as speedtests, like webpages tend to be fairly short and bursty. However, you should notice it in the speedtests some of the time. If all your speedtests are perfectly in line with daytime tests, I would look at the ISP.

For what it's worth, 1080p streams shouldn't take more than 5-8 Mbps anyway, as the bitrate doesn't tend to warrant more than that. I watch 1080p streams with a 10 Meg connection. No problems. Two streams cause buffering. So that being said, Twitch 'speed' isn't a worthwhile measure of your connection, unless you're in the habit of downloading entire vods.

Some ISPs in the UK operate throttling based on data type (e.g. Plusnet). It's so that heavy users don't kill the network for the rest.

One way to see if it's you alone is to ask some neighbours about any similar speed issues.