Web pages will randomly not load or stop loading

Hello,

I've had this problem forever at my parent's home and would like to solve it now because I don't have the patience my parents have.

Web pages, any web page, will either:
a) instantly load
b) not load (get stuck on the "waiting for... statusbar notification, after DNS resolving)
c) load partially and then get stuck, with the browser showing the "loading" animation.

I have found no way to reproduce this reliably. The same page may do a, b, and c when reloading it three consecutive times. Some days the problem is hardly noticeable and some others it is almost unusable. The "solution" my parents have used for years is to reload the page until it shows up.

Note: this only happens with web pages/services. Web pages, or downloads, behave like this. Any other internet service I have tried, including games, p2p, irc, ping, work perfectly fine.

Searching the web I found two suggestion: it may be either a hardware problem, or a MTU problem.


Now I'll explain my network setup:
There is an old machine that acts as a gateway, and is connected to the internet via ppp. This and every other computer in the house are connnected via wifi to a router.

Connecting any one of the end-machines to the internet directly via PPP does not solve the problem. The PPP connection is actually a 3g connection. Using a different cell phone or USB stick does not solve the problem. To me this means there is no hardware problem.

Using the "ping method" on one of the end-machines, running windows, I have determined that the "optimum" mtu size is 1450. I have tried setting mtu on the end-machine, on the gateway wan port, and on the gateway wlan port. The problem persists. I have found no mtu setting on the wireless router.

I need suggestions, I have not tried every possible combination of settings, because it is a lenghty and tedious process (the problem may show up after hours of flawless browsing).

 

Hi dementrio and welcome to MGs.
I doubt I can help you as I am more hardware oriented but some questions for more information that may be useful.

I assume you are using IE as the browser. Have you tried alternate browsers - Firefox, Chrome, etc? Same behavior?
Have you tried running IE with add-ons disabled?
Have you tried booting into Safe Mode with Networking and browsing from there?
Someone else should step in on this or this may possibly be better off in the Software forum.

 

I've tried more combinations of browser/OS you'd care to hear. We have or have had windows, mac and linux machines all of them with this problem. I don't think it's a software issue. It may be a problem with the only internet provider avaiable here, but as you'd expect it's impossible to discuss this with them.

 

I have an update on this. The problem goes away if I set an absurdly low mtu (300). Of course I notice a considerable drop in performance because of this, but web pages now load reliably.

Any suggestion on why this may be? according to ping packets don't need fragmentation until a much higher size. But with mtu set at 350 the problem already comes back.