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Why is my upload speed so bad from Toronto to California?

2K views 5 replies 4 participants last post by  tux 
#1 ·
I just bought a subscription to BackBlaze to do online backups. They give you unlimited backups for $50/yr and I got a deal with 50% off. So my plan is to back up my media server which has many TBs of files.

I start my backup tonight and it will take 491 days to complete, even with several drives excluded.

My internet service is Roger 250/20 with 1 TB/month. When I do a speedtest.net test to a Toronto server I get around my posted rates. But when I do a speedtest to a server in the San Fran area (where Backblaze is located) I get wildly varying download speeds of 11-80 Mbps down and but only 0.5-3 Mbps up????

Why would I be getting such slow upload speeds? These tests were run at 1215am EDT on a Friday night.

There is a setting where you can select the upload speed and I have that set to 3 GB/day - which is the highest that it allows me right now.
 
#2 ·
Well you got to think, its the PATH that its taking.

Between you, through rogers, to the Toronto server.. there is maybe.. 4-5 hops.. not a huge amount, a few rogers, then maybe from rogers to whoever the endpoint is, and that's it.

Going to a server in California.. there is MANY more hops inbetween. Jumping from possibly 2-3 or more providers or networks as it goes along its path.

its possible that one of them his having issues. I know there is a major interconnect in the US right now, which a lot of people go through to get to game servers (wow, LoL, etc)
which is causing havoc with their connections.

If you did a traceroute to the end server there.. might show you some HIGH pings in certain areas.. where the problem may emanating from.
 
#3 ·
When you write software that does large file transfers (e.g. backup software), you design it to send large amounts of data per "logical" packet (which is different from the physical TCP packets), and you don't wait for the acknowledgement of receipt of the last large packet before you start the next one. This makes your software relatively insensitive to situations where you may have high bandwidth but also high latency (which can be caused by "bufferbloat").

So, the latency issues that gdkitty is describing shouldn't have a significant effect on Wayne's backup software, unless there was a serious problem with how the software was designed.

Instead, I'd suspect that there is some throttling going on somewhere along the line. It could be Rogers or it could be Backblaze. Try setting up a VPN connection to a endpoint that is geographically closer to Backblaze servers than where you are now and re-running the test. If you get faster performance via a VPN, then it is very likely a issue with Rogers.
 
#4 ·
I was only using the ping, as a method of finding a possibly potential bad node.
(often the ping will be sky high on it as well).

A better test, would be something like a pathping, which would show packet loss, etc.

I believe Wayne said, that he just did a SPEED TEST to a California server, and was getting the slow speeds.. not necessarily the backup service.
Throttling, then likely wouldn't be effecting the SPEED TEST.

Likely, most traffic TO California, is routed across the same general nodes on the way from here to there.. and there may be problem along the way.
 
#5 ·
In the Backblaze control panel it shows the speed of the last file backed up. For me this seems to rand from about 0.2Mbps to 3Mbps (although I will have to ensure that it is Mbps and not MBps).

Backblaze does give a throttling action but I currently have that set to limit the backup to 30GB per day although as I said in the first post when you are getting slower speeds it only allows you to set lower a lower max likie 2GB/day. In the three days that it has been running it is getting pretty close to 30GB/day so I guess it is doing okay even though at times it appears to not be getting very good throughput.

Currently I am backing up my music and photos but once I go on to videos then there will be a lot more data to move that I will have to ration so that I don't use up all of my 1TB/month limit.
 
#6 ·
I looked at the BackBlaze site and they have their own speed test there, http://www.backblaze.com/speedtest . Never mind speedtest.net , how fast does BackBlaze's speed test indicate your speed to be?

Also, BackBlaze's help page shows some screen shots of the backup software they use. In the BackBlaze Preferences, there's a "Performance" tab, with a slider bar to manually throttle your connection (which defaults to 512 Kbps or 3GB/day). So regardless of what speedtest.net may be telling you, the throttle may be in your software preferences.
 
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