Ask HN: Slow download to company's website, except on VPN

1 pointsby boxysean5 lat temu2 comments

I recently signed up for Internet service with Magenta (formerly T-Mobile) in Vienna, Austria. It's a basic 40 down / 10 up home service, and generally works well and as-advertised.

EXCEPT!

I am also starting a new job at a company that serves a web app hosted in AWS (us-east-1). After cutting over to Magenta, my web calls to static files and API calls to this web app are taking a very long time. For example, it takes between 2-5 minutes to download a 6 MB file. I am the only one at my company who is experiencing this, and no customers are reporting any issues!

This evening, I tried downloading the same 6 MB file while connected to an Austrian VPN offered by NordVPN, and the download took 2 seconds!

Any thoughts about what might be happening to me, or suggestions on what to try to debug/isolate the issue? Thanks!

2 comments

tiernano5 lat temu

Sounds like a peering issue between your isp and aws... Unless other customers and employees are using the same isp... Then it might be your network or machine... Many possibilities

boxysean5 lat temu

Thanks! I eliminated that it was my machine -- I observed the same phenomenon on two machines.

I launched my own EC2 web instance in us-east-1 and hosted one of the slow files, and repeatedly downloaded it using a `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`. I similarly observed a slow download speed (128Kbps) without my NordVPN connection.

Oddly enough, I also observed a slow download speed to my us-east-1 server WITH my NordVPN connection, so that let me to believe it's a broader issue, however I did observe a fast download speed from an AWS server located in eu-central-1.

I'm generally confused. Connecting to NordVPN eliminates my issue, but the tests I am conducting are providing inconclusive evidence as to why this is the case!