PSINet/Cogent Latency

Tue Jul 23 16:19:58 UTC 2002

It has a lot of similarities to old Audi's.  Remember they used to work 
fine and then for no reason used to fall in to drive, rev high, and run 
over Grandma and  the kids!  Sounds a bit like their peering.:)

On Tue, 23 
Jul 2002, Streiner, Justin wrote:

> 
> On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
> 
> > Yes, it's horrid. I've been peering with PSI for going on three years, and
> > it's never been as bad as it is now.
> 
> I took advantage of their "free peering" offer back in the day, and ended
> up peering with them for about 18 months (06/1999 - 01/2001).  It took
> about 9 months for them to get the circuit installed.
> 
> For the first few months, everything was great, but then we started
> getting massive spikes in latency (300-700ms) just getting across the pipe
> between my router and PSI's router.  I liken it to owning an old Audi -
> they were great when they ran, but spent more time in the shop than on the
> road.
> 
> The process of opening tickets and getting clued people in their NOC to
> talk to me was an adventure.  PSI, much like some other providers, went to
> great pains to try keeping $CUSTOMER from having a direct path to
> $CLUEDPEOPLE.
> 
> They could never adequately explain the latency, other than it would
> mysteriously go away and re-appear, more or less independent of the amount
> of traffic on the circuit.  Eventually an upper-level engineer told me
> that the saturation was due to congestion on their end of the pipe, and
> getting some fatter pipe in there would take 60 days.
> 
> Fine.
> 
> 90 days later, the bigger pipe is installed on their end and the latency
> goes away for a few weeks, then comes back.
> 
> Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.
> 
> A few more months of that, and I cancelled the peering.
> 
> > oddly enough, we see 30+ msec across a DS3 to them, which isn't that
> > loaded (35 to 40 mb/s).
> >
> > Then, behind whatever we peer with, we see over 400 msec, with 50% loss,
> > during business hours.
> 