DSL speeds dropping at night

[rebeccamichael]

For the past few nights, at around 11PM - 1 AM, the internet speed will suddenly drop dramatically, until I go and reset the modem. It gets to the point where even the smallest images will not load, and it feels like I'm back on dial-up.

And even then, it only works for about 5-10 minutes before the speed drops to unusable again.

Any idea why this may occur?

[tjj]

I just took a look at your line and didn't see any interference issues, but then looking at your latency and bandwidth graph, it appears that there is something along this timeframe that is utilizing all of your upload bandwidth. Do you have any backup software or something similar that could be uploading a large amount of data during the time that you experience these slow times?

[rebeccamichael]

Not that I'm aware of. When it happened, my router didn't report any bandwidth being used.

[arneill-py]

Secure your Wifi, maybe. Someone else may be using it; it may be hidden software in your PC

[rebeccamichael]

Wi-fi is secured with WPA2

Scanned PC last night, found nothing

[dane]

Looking at your usage graphs, I think this may be a red herring. I do see a chunk of upstream usage yesterday for example, from a little after 6pm until a bit after 7pm, when you're consuming about 350kbps - but that's 1/2 of your upstream, and it's not consistent every evening. But - most evenings, you do have a chunk of usage upstream, but it's not consistent.

If/when it happens again, consider logging into the router to see what clients are listed as associated with it, and also perhaps bypass the router and see if the performance issue persists.

-Dane

[rebeccamichael]

Usage upstream may be with people using Skype/Teamspeak and other programs as well as games. (But not as late as I was saying in the first post)

I'll check it again if it occurs again. I myself am not doing any bandwidth-hogging activities, but I cannot vouch for everyone in the household.

[arneill-py]

I like to know, so I have full monitoring, here:
http://arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us/
From 5:00pm to 6:20pm today, something sucked out all my available upstream. I don't know (yet) who it is, most likely a poorly designed web crawler reloading my entire personal website.

Dane, maybe making the bandwith monitoring available in the user tools?

Red Herring it may be, but vouching for everyone in the household goes a long way; I have had a few customers who where really embarassed when I pointed out why their VPN tunnel to the office was slow at night

The devil is in the details!

[rthughes]

My DSL has been doing the exact same thing. I've had a rock solid 11Mbps, for months. Then, starting a few
weeks ago, when I get up in the morning, the speed has dropped to around 4Mbps. If I reset, it goes back up
to 11Mbps for the rest of the day. This drop happens overnight after 1am. Each and every night, the exact same
drop happens, like clockwork.