Very slow searching?

Question

I have had this problem the last month and it is driving me insane. Whenever I click on a related artist or I do a search for an artist and then click the artist it takes about 30 seconds for the songs to show up. I know it has nothing to do with my internet connection because I am at 100mb/s fiber connection at work and at home I am at 60mb/s fiber. The issues occurs both at work and at home. Any fix for this?

Answer 1

Have been experiencing this issue for the last two weeks using the iPhone app with BT Infinity, everything else works fine, including the Windows client. If I take my home router to another site or use 3G it works great. Tonight, for example, the search doesn't seem to cancel when I try to unjam it after waiting over a minute for results. I then tried searching again and after another minute I was able to see the results in the Artist search. I am a light web user (DNS/HTTP/SSH) and do not run any P2P/mass sending traffic across the network. If you wish to track traffic to my account I can follow a test plan between 19:00-21:00 UTC tomorrow if this helps diagnose the issue. The following may help: Reading the first answer on http://community.bt.com/t5/BB-Speed-Connection-Issues/Do-BT-throttle-Spotify/td-p/303889/page/2 seems to be BT's official advice on the topic (this is due to it being written by a "Community Manager" who should know, or say as much, if unsure): "If you are concurrently running applications that use P2P alongside Spotify we recommend you stop the P2P application for a trial period (e.g. under an hour) and see if this stabilises the Spotify experience. If this stabilises the Spotify experience it may be the characteristics of the P2P application that is interacting adversely, if this is the case please let us know as below." As it is a fibre to the curb solution, the VSDL DSLAM is in the box at the end of the street. Depending on how the network is designed and where the QoS is applied, my scenario of a low traffic user shouldn't be affected. Hmm... My first thought is that Huawei (who seem to supply all of BT's VDSL tech) wouldn't have provided QoS capable boxes for installation in so many locations. I'm guessing that they have selected these (or very similar judging by the boxes around the streets of London), especially when the sales gumph states: "Approximately 5,000 cabinets ha[ve]s [been] installed in the field " so the QoS will be applied on the other end of the fibre. WARNING: The following is pure speculation on my part (seriously, it can be regarded as fiction)! Now putting yourself in the position of the person remotely controlling/monitoring the kit at the exchanges; how do you filter the traffic coming in? Well you'd classify network traffic queues such as Web, Email, VoIP, P2P, etc (called class-based queueing) and then divide equally between ISP controlled IP addresses. Picture the scene, the network engineers are given a new GUI based tool which provides network monitoring and analysis tools. They define a set of metrics to watch, making sure latency doesn't spike, I'd bet it doesn't include any monitoring of the iPhone client for Spotify (although the world would be a better place if companies such as Spotify could centrally register their servers/traffic profiles and this is fed into ISP kit). A bright spark notices a pattern. The PE routers providing certain ranges are over utilising the network and causing latency spikes for all customers. The fact (and I use the term in the loosest sense) that TalkTalk and a few BT Infinity DSLAMs are causing the problem is not even consider, as quite likely that information is not displayed to the staff running operations (although I'm sure if they cared, they'd of added it to their dashboards, hmm...). As TalkTalk (currently one of the UKs cheapest providers) and Hauwei are unlikely have QoS on their kit: everyone downstream of the router is punished when the jumpy P2P filters suddenly include Spotify (hinted to in the BT answer mentioned above)congestion occurs and with ISPs controlling Bufferbloat we get tail dropupstream TCPACK packets (beyond the PE router) may be classified as P2P and dropped (RED shooting them out of the sky)Good luck getting BT to help, but yell if I can. Please get in touch with BT as Spotify is unbeatable.