Question One computer has priority over the internet than the other.

[Halo11702]

I just moved into a new apartment and bought 25Mb/s internet. The problem is, my roommate and I both have computers and he always has priority over the internet no matter what. If I start downloading something on my computer I will get the full 25Mb/s (about 3MB/s) but as soon as he loads a webpage or downloads a map on a game, my download drops to about 30-40Kb/s. If he is downloading something and I try to play a game or even load a website it takes forever but eventually loads. It also makes playing any games unplayable because if he is either downloading something, watching youtube etc, he gets all the internet. I know our internet isn't fast but I don't get why he gets all the internet and I don't, not even splitting it either.

Example of what happened today.

1. I started downloading a game (Killing Floor 2) at 3MB/s
2. He started loading youtube
3. My download drops immediately to 40kb/s
4. His video is loaded
5. My speed goes back up

Example 2

1. He starts also downloading Killing floor
2. My internet cuts out completely and it says I'm offline for a few seconds, then 30-40kb/s download
3. He gets 2.8-2.9kb/s for the remainder of the time.

Why doesn't it split the internet? Every time he does something I get nothing! It's super annoying because I can't even play online games when he is doing anything on the internet because I lose connection. Whether that be just him loading a webpage or playing games as well. On Sea of Thieves, we were playing together and he had 60-70 ping while mine was bouncing in between 300-999!!

Edit :
-Both on ethernet (Tried using his cables and he uses mine but the same result)
-I cannot access the routers administrative properties because the provider says so
-I have heard of QOS But again I don't know how to enable it if my router supports it without getting into the router's settings. Unless there is a different way I don't know of.

 

[bill001g]

When you are both using ethernet then you should be equal. Wifi is a completely different story.

The only way he would be actually favored is if QoS was already setup to favor his machines. The default is you both try to get as much as you can and who ever wins wins.

Not sure it all depends if you think he is intentionally doing something. There are other hacker type programs that attempt to hog bandwidth.

 

[Halo11702]

When you are both using ethernet then you should be equal. Wifi is a completely different story.

The only way he would be actually favored is if QoS was already setup to favor his machines. The default is you both try to get as much as you can and who ever wins wins.

Not sure it all depends if you think he is intentionally doing something. There are other hacker type programs that attempt to hog bandwidth.

He isn't intentionally doing anything its just that his system seems to always have priority and I dont know why. QOS According to my internet provider needs to be setup yet so I dont think its qos that's doing it. If we are both using ethernet it should be shared! Thats why I'm really confused. Is there something else I'm missing here?

 

[bill001g]

If you had asked how do you accomplish what is happening I would have told you to put in rules that give a certain bandwidth to his machine.

Your PC does not actually know his even exists. Your traffic talks directly to sites on the internet and so does his. There is not internet site that is really favored even though some like steam are very good at using all the bandwidth. So you both make requests to servers on the internet and your ISP attempts to send as much as possible to your house randomly discarding what won't fit. The ISP can not tell which machine in your house is which. It all appears to come from the router and almost all traffic is encrypted anyway.

SO I can't say why this is happening. It would almost have to be some setting in your PC you would think. Then again I can't see what setting would favor his machine since yours does not actually see his traffic.

 

[CElliott-316]

QOS matters; you must be able to determine what your settings are.

TCP/IP, the Internet protocol, depends very heavily on CPU speed and O/S priority. On a Windows computer, you can greatly increase your download speed and response by raising the priority of the program doing the downloading. The reason for this, is that TCP must acknowledge every packet, and packet transmission ceases until the CPU-O/S combination does so. So, if your computer is less fast then your roommate's then he is going to be provided faster Internet service just because he can acknowledge packets faster than you. In addition, if your computer is performing two actions at once -- say, playing a game and downloading -- packet response time will be lengthened. Computers, especially single core machines, don't do two actions at once; they do one thing at a time at a very fast speed so they look they are doing two things.

It is almost certainly true that your roommate is acknowledging receipt of TCP/IP packets faster than you are. The delay is in the computer, the cable to the switch and/or router, or generally in the transmission path. You have to look for it. You can't manage what you can't measure. You should be able to use Wireshark or another of the packet sniffing tools to determine where the delay is occurring.

 

[Halo11702]

QOS matters; you must be able to determine what your settings are.

TCP/IP, the Internet protocol, depends very heavily on CPU speed and O/S priority. On a Windows computer, you can greatly increase your download speed and response by raising the priority of the program doing the downloading. The reason for this, is that TCP must acknowledge every packet, and packet transmission ceases until the CPU-O/S combination does so. So, if your computer is less fast then your roommate's then he is going to be provided faster Internet service just because he can acknowledge packets faster than you. In addition, if your computer is performing two actions at once -- say, playing a game and downloading -- packet response time will be lengthened. Computers, especially single core machines, don't do two actions at once; they do one thing at a time at a very fast speed so they look they are doing two things.

It is almost certainly true that your roommate is acknowledging receipt of TCP/IP packets faster than you are. The delay is in the computer, the cable to the switch and/or router, or generally in the transmission path. You have to look for it. You can't manage what you can't measure. You should be able to use Wireshark or another of the packet sniffing tools to determine where the delay is occurring.

Thanks for the info. We both have fairly high-end systems with mine having a 3900x and a 5700xt and his having an i7-9700k with a 2070. I was doing some research and I saw someone mention a device that balances it for you? Is that a thing or am I misunderstanding something? Also you mentioned a delay. So him and I both have different ethernet cables. One is 16ft and the other is 12ft. So I could see why there would be a delay. We did try switching cables once and it did nothing though. So is it just that his cpu can handle it better?

 

[bill001g]

If you REALLY want to calculate it there is some tiny difference in delay based on the length of a cable. The speed of signal in copper cables is around 2/3 the speed of light. If I remember correclty it is about 300 nano seconds for 100ft. You can do the conversion but it is a extremely tiny fraction of 1ms.

The cpu seldom will impact network performance. In the old days tcp packets used to be acknowledged much more often than current methodologies. Now days they use what is called sliding tcp window size. Even previously it put very little load on a cpu.

Not sure I would suspect some silly OS setting. Be sure you do not have any form of "gamer" network stuff in your machine. Killer chipsets are the worst oftenders of this.

You could try to boot your machine off a linux USB boot image. This would leave your current OS uneffected and you could test performance. It should actually run somewhat worse since everything is running off a USB stick rather than high speed SSD or hard drive,

It should show if you are being affected by his machine.

Your problem though is very very strange.

 

[CElliott-316]

In base/boost freqs the difference between a 3900x and a i7-9700k is small -- 3.8/4.6 vs. 3.6/4.6 (GHz).

It is true that most high-traffic websites have a computer that distributes incoming requests for service to server instances in a round-robin fashion, but I have never seen one for sale in the consumer market.

As bill001b wrote a difference in cable lengths that small does not matter. What can matter is cable quality, if and only if you have giga-bit Ethernet (GBE) from the router to your computers, in which case you need cat 5e or cat 6 or 7 cables and not cat 5. Intel Ethernet adapters will detect the cable type and slow up if they deem the cable needs it. But I don't think that is your problem. The problem is that your computer slows up when your roomy uses the Internet.

There are only four things I can think of that you might look at:

1. EIST (Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology). Try disabling it in the BIOS of your computer and see if that makes a difference. There is a chance that the Intel part of EIST is not tuned for an AMD CPU.
2. The router has several ports that cables from the computers to the router plug into. Perhaps the router favors one port over another, so try exchanging the ports the cables plug into.
3. Download and install Wireshark on your computer, and see what the differences are in TCP/IP packet handling when you are running, say, a benchmark and downloading a long file and your roomy is or is not using his/her computer.
4. Define the situation as "good" and then figure out how it is good:

a. You are developing into a kind and considerate gentleman by letting your roomy have all the fun.
b. You plan on charging your roomy a higher rent since he/she/it is hogging the Internet.
c. Since you are no longer a child, you decided to put away childish things like games, and so --
i. Someone told you that everyone whoever made it had a mentor, so you went to an older manager at your place of work and said
you wanted to contribute at a higher level and have more responsibility and your new best friend gave you lots of subjects to
learn and study.
ii. Someone told you that knowledge of the social sciences was the sine qua non to entrance into management so you purchased
comprehensive introductory textbooks from a college bookstore in sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology,
cultural anthropology, archaeology, economics and some say geography, law, and linguistics and spent the next two to three
years reading them in your spare time. The longer you put this off, the more you are going to beat yourself over the head when
you finally do master this material.
iii. Someone told you that the purpose of life in a Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Western European, Anglo-American culture is to
bring progress to society, to strive for freedom for oneself and others, particularly freedom from the tyrannies of poverty and
ignorance, and to help the poor, so you now spend all your spare time figuring out how you are going to accomplish this.

 

[DeauteratedDog]

I'm leaning towards a difference in the way TCP is configured on the two PCs.

You could start with comparing the output from:
netsh interface tcp show global
and
netsh interface tcp show heuristics

The suggestion to do some captures with Wireshark and go digging is good if you have the skills.

 

[Halo11702]

I'm leaning towards a difference in the way TCP is configured on the two PCs.

You could start with comparing the output from:
netsh interface tcp show global
and
netsh interface tcp show heuristics

The suggestion to do some captures with Wireshark and go digging is good if you have the skills.

Im not very advanced when it comes to networking so I don't really know what you're talking about tbh xD But I am thinking I might just have to deal with it cause I don't know what to do anymore. I talked to my internet provider and they said its weird and confusing but never ended up actually helping me out. So I guess ill just deal with it. Its just really annoying that when he plays games that download a lot of stuff I cant really do anything.