MWeb's shaping rules

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LancelotSA

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So we have had Afrihost be transparent with their shaping rules and at what level they apply it for each line speed.

Now I have had my MWeb 384k uncapped account since the 24th April. Throughout April the speeds on my news server downloads were pretty good. I had a few hiccups but that was around the Seacom cable problem.

Since that was rectified my news server downloads had been running consistently at around +35KB/s day and night. Now since about 2pm today it dropped off to about 18KB/s. I assumed this might be because of increased use on a work day but now at 9pm it is still only running at 20KB/s with some peaks to 23KB/s. Nowhere near the 38KB/s peaks I used to get.

These current speeds are obviously OK but not near as good as I was getting.

So my question is does any one have any clue how MWeb are imposing their shaping rules? MWeb rep perhaps you can respond.
 
I think Mweb just do as the mood grabs them. I'm on a 4096 line and haven't had full speed on news servers all month. Last month full speed was a regular occurrence. But others have had full speed this month, and some were complaining last month about not hitting full speed when I was. I think it's a load shedding thing.
 
MWEB shape P2P, Usenet and such from 8am to about 11pm, then it slowly starts to open up, by 1am, your line (if you were on 4MB) would be doing 200KB and 5am, 400KB/s.

I've got my line all graphed so I know exactly what it is doing... this is what has been happening for quite a while now... same pattern.
 
LancelotSA said:
So we have had Afrihost be transparent with their shaping rules and at what level they apply it for each line speed.

Now I have had my MWeb 384k uncapped account since the 24th April. Throughout April the speeds on my news server downloads were pretty good. I had a few hiccups but that was around the Seacom cable problem.

Since that was rectified my news server downloads had been running consistently at around +35KB/s day and night. Now since about 2pm today it dropped off to about 18KB/s. I assumed this might be because of increased use on a work day but now at 9pm it is still only running at 20KB/s with some peaks to 23KB/s. Nowhere near the 38KB/s peaks I used to get.

These current speeds are obviously OK but not near as good as I was getting.

So my question is does any one have any clue how MWeb are imposing their shaping rules? MWeb rep perhaps you can respond.
Click to expand...

lol, funny you should post this today. I just signed up with mweb this morning on a 4mb uncapped account. The first thing I did was fire up a few torrents to see where I'm at in terms of shaping and to my disappointment I haven't exceeded 70kb/s all day. I was waiting to see if they would maybe relax their shaping rules after hours but as you say it's past 9PM now and i'm still yet to see full speed.

Currently I am doing 48kb/s in uTorrent. It's been like that pretty much all of today. Hopefully I just joined on a bad day and I will be able to get better speeds in the coming days.
 
You should differentiate between shaping and throttling. Throttling is what Afrihost is doing when you hit their specified milestones, 30GB, 60GB etc etc. They limit your access speed to something other than your linespeed. Shaping is what both do on a daily basis giving priority to certain protocols above others. MWEB said from day one p2p, torrents and certain hosting sites like rapidshare will be allocated the lowest priority. I have not seen MWEB, and I doubt very much that they even do, throttling linespeed. They shape their traffic heavily but don't touch your access speed.
 
Nokoff, nope... that's how it is bru.
Check at like 2/3am - will be flying (for a bit anyways) till 8am, then it's down to sucky speeds.
 
Im actually starting to get pretty peeved off with their shaping system now.
 
LancelotSA said:
So we have had Afrihost be transparent with their shaping rules and at what level they apply it for each line speed.

Now I have had my MWeb 384k uncapped account since the 24th April. Throughout April the speeds on my news server downloads were pretty good. I had a few hiccups but that was around the Seacom cable problem.

Since that was rectified my news server downloads had been running consistently at around +35KB/s day and night. Now since about 2pm today it dropped off to about 18KB/s. I assumed this might be because of increased use on a work day but now at 9pm it is still only running at 20KB/s with some peaks to 23KB/s. Nowhere near the 38KB/s peaks I used to get.

These current speeds are obviously OK but not near as good as I was getting.

So my question is does any one have any clue how MWeb are imposing their shaping rules? MWeb rep perhaps you can respond.
Click to expand...

I signed up for an uncapped account on the 1st May. For the first 2 hours I was getting 38kbs on usenet. Since then (for over a week) I have been getting 20kb/s max during offpeak and 10kb/s during peak on usenet. Torrents about half that speed. I only get max line speed on html. Since this evening my ping times have also dropped to 300ms+.

I have a feeling this all has to do with excessive shaping. I have tried all possible protocols and ports and often I get download speeds of 38kb/s for 5 seconds and then it drops to 10kb/s or 20kb/s a second again. Thus, I think MWEB has implemented package based shaping, i.e. each package sent and received gets checked and if its a download it gets shaped. That would explain why for a few seconds downloads are full speed (usually usenet port 80 or ssl)
 
Google the 'OSI model', then google 'L7 shapers and inspectors'. There is only a very very few ways to bypass their shapers. The search function here should help you out there :D
 
RogueRunner said:
Google the 'OSI model', then google 'L7 shapers and inspectors'. There is only a very very few ways to bypass their shapers. The search function here should help you out there :D
Click to expand...

Interesting, surely a VPN should work?
 
So many people complaining. Mweb is by far the fastest in this price range. Maybe go try another ISP if you don't like Mweb. You will be crawling back or paying R300 extra for a better account.

I've tested 3 4096k uncapped accounts and Mweb is BY FAR the fastest. FTP and HTTP downloads go at full speed. Just p2p and Usenet which is shaped quite heavily I must admit but compared to other this is still top noch!
 
I would love to download at 460kbps all day to.....but realistically this would be kinda hard for isp`s to sustain. Doesnt it cost them about R4000 for a 1Mbps international line? Would be nice to get 400kbps 24/7......but who really needs to download 1Tb every month. And since every1 is just getting uncapped now, most people will probably be downloading everything they have wanted since `95, so the network load at the moment has to be fairly high even at night. They are finally moving in the right direction......

But yeah the shaping thing is annoying gaming wise. The accounts cant even be used to play Dota locally, havent even tried first person shooters. Howbout unshaping some gaming port! Seriously.....counter strike takes about 3kbps!
 
BrokenLink said:
I would love to download at 460kbps all day to.....but realistically this would be kinda hard for isp`s to sustain. Doesnt it cost them about R4000 for a 1Mbps international line? Would be nice to get 400kbps 24/7......but who really needs to download 1Tb every month. And since every1 is just getting uncapped now, most people will probably be downloading everything they have wanted since `95, so the network load at the moment has to be fairly high even at night. They are finally moving in the right direction......

But yeah the shaping thing is annoying gaming wise. The accounts cant even be used to play Dota locally, havent even tried first person shooters. Howbout unshaping some gaming port! Seriously.....counter strike takes about 3kbps!
Click to expand...

I have pretty decent gaming pings. I have no lag on bad company 2 no matter when I play.
 
My HTTP traffic on 4mbps line is down to about 30kb/s since 9pm. It did full speed before then.
 
I've been looking at your Mweb related posts. You certainly seem to buck the forum trend with your experiences!
 
OK well now my MWeb news server speeds are even more sucky!

I'm getting peaks of 30KB/s every so often but unfortunately they are followed by periods of nothing. It reminds me of the spikes I used to get on the IS news server!

Ooh, wait, as I was typing this it seems things improved. I popped back to Grabit to get a screenshot to post and was seeing 38KB/s... let's see if it lasts or drops off again. The spikes are still visible earlier. In my first week with MWeb I had a solid bar peaking at around 38KB/s....

Clipboard0142.jpg


Oops, no, false hope. It lasted a little while and then dropped to 0.
 
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