Seeing very slow download rates.
For the past two days I have been seeing very slow download rates in Firefox. For example, when I started downloading the latest version of Lucid Puppy Linux, I'm getting download rates of 60-80 kB/s. However, if I run a Speedtest, I get approximately 12.50 Mb/s down and 0.30 Mb/s up (quite horrendous, I know). And, if I attempt the same download in Chrome (V. 28.0.1500.95 m) I get a rather stable 1.3 MB/s download rate. I've tried other downloads from other websites with the same results.
I tried starting Firefox up in Safe Mode with no add-ons, same result. The only add-ons I have installed are Adblock Plus (2.3.2) and a few dictionaries, along with the regular spread of plugins. As an interesting aside, while I was in the process of writing this I updated Shockwave. The ~7 MB download for Shockwave was downloaded at the usual 1.3 MB/s. Now I'm really curious as to what is going on!
Modified by NXTreme
All Replies (4)
Hello,
Many site issues can be caused by corrupt cookies or cache. In order to try to fix these problems, the first step is to clear both cookies and the cache. Note: This will temporarily log you out of all sites you're logged in to. To clear cache and cookies do the following:
- Go to Firefox > History > Clear recent history or (if no Firefox button is shown) go to Tools > Clear recent history.
- Under "Time range to clear", select "Everything".
- Now, click the arrow next to Details to toggle the Details list active.
- From the details list, check Cache and Cookies and uncheck everything else.
- Now click the Clear now button.
Further information can be found in the Clear your cache, history and other personal information in Firefox article.
Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!
Thank you.
Note that sites like Speedtest are using the Flash plugin.
You can check for problems with current Flash plugin versions and try these:
- disable a possible RealPlayer Browser Record Plugin extension for Firefox and update the RealPlayer if installed
- disable protected mode in the Flash plugin (Flash 11.3+ on Windows Vista and later)
- disable hardware acceleration in the Flash plugin
Hi Waka_Flocka_Flame,
I cleared the cookies and cache as you recommended, to no avail. I then tried clearing everything using a recent release of CCleaner, with strange results.
The Lucid Puppy download, for example, downloads at the usual 60-80 kB/s from ibiblio.org, while the same file downloaded from nluug.nl gives me the usual 1.3 MB/s download rate. I was also able to attain that speed while downloading a .zip file from a Amazon S3 hosted website. While downloading the files that originally gave me the extremely slow download rates (Android device ROMs from Media Fire and Dev-Host) I am now getting the full 1.3 MB/s download rate.
In other words, I'm appearing to get slow download rates on certain files, and normal rates on others. However, the files that give me problems one day are perfectly normal the next. I think I'll don my confused face for a while.
@cor-el: Maybe I'm mis-understanding what you wrote, but I am having problems with file downloads, not Flash performance.
Thank you both for your time!
Just a quick update to say that the slow download issue has seemingly disappeared. I haven't had any problems with my last couple downloads. I'm hoping that the problem was either server issues with a certain host, or ISP throttling of some weird kind. Again, thanks for your time!