Degraded Internet Response Time

I have recently experienced significantly degraded performance when browsing the internet, especially in Yahoo mail, but also in other sites.  It's to the point where I can be sending an email and waiting several seconds for typed letters to appear!  It seems similar in each browser I've tried - Chrome, Edge, Firefox.  I'm using Verizon FIOS with (supposedly) 75 mbps service.  I am not doing any high-end gaming or graphics, but I often keep quite a few tabs open in my browser.  (But I've been doing that for a long time and the change is fairly recent.)  I have a relatively new laptop computer which has 16g RAM and a terabyte hard drive with lots of free space and running Windows 10, so that should not be a bottleneck.  Any ideas where I should start with troubleshooting this?

First, off/on the FIOS router and any switches/routers attached to the FIOS router. By off/on, I mean 30 second count. Make sure laptop is connecting to your (and only your) wireless router (SSID). If that doesn't take care of it, hard connect (ethernet cable) your laptop to the router. Do a speed test, both wired and wireless to see if the problem shows that way. If wired is showing a problem, call Verizon. If just wireless has a problem, you need to confirm if it's just your laptop or anyone using your wireless. Anyone? call Verizon. Just your laptop? then probably wireless card drivers in the laptop need updated/better configuration.

That's a start.

Sir_Dave said:

First, off/on the FIOS router and any switches/routers attached to the FIOS router. By off/on, I mean 30 second count. Make sure laptop is connecting to your (and only your) wireless router (SSID). If that doesn't take care of it, hard connect (ethernet cable) your laptop to the router. Do a speed test, both wired and wireless to see if the problem shows that way. If wired is showing a problem, call Verizon. If just wireless has a problem, you need to confirm if it's just your laptop or anyone using your wireless. Anyone? call Verizon. Just your laptop? then probably wireless card drivers in the laptop need updated/better configuration.

That's a start.

Thanks!  It's happening on both wired and wireless.  I usually plug into the Ethernet cable when sitting at my desk.  Can you suggest a link for a reliable speed test?

Speedtest.net should work just fine. Have you made any adjustments to the Fios router configuration or is it pure vanilla? If you haven’t, maybe someone else has, consider resetting the router to factory defaults.

I've noticed similar probs with Yahoomail lately. Things seem faster when I don't keep the mail tab open (I keep an eye on mail on the Yahoo phone app).

The fact that keyboard echo is slow shouldn't be related to your network speed. What email app are you using?

Did you reboot your computer since this happened? Have you installed all the latest updates and then rebooted?

I am starting to think that this is a Yahoo Mail issue and I'm hearing from others (including @ril's post above) that they are also having issues with it.  If so, then I would think (hope) that Yahoo might address it at some point ...  

It started being a problem for me a few months ago - maybe May/June timeframe, but I'm not sure.

Sir_Dave said:

Speedtest.net should work just fine. Have you made any adjustments to the Fios router configuration or is it pure vanilla? If you haven’t, maybe someone else has, consider resetting the router to factory defaults.

I don't think we have adjusted the router.  I get 82 for both upload/download on the wired Ethernet connection, but only 16-18 on the WiFi.  But the problems I've posted about are more or less the same whether on the wired or WiFi connection.

We have a box with a new router that came from Verizon the other day, so will probably put that in and see if it helps the WiFi.  (I had renewed my contract with no change of service and a slight price reduction, but they took it upon themselves to send a new router anyway.  So, we'll see ...)

That speedtest.net page is chock full of ads trying to divert you from the correct button to press, though.  Very annoying.

earlster said:

Did you reboot your computer since this happened? Have you installed all the latest updates and then rebooted?

Yes, it's been happening for several months now and I have rebooted many times - not every day, but certainly at least once a week.  I get updates applied automatically.

Tom_Reingold said:

The fact that keyboard echo is slow shouldn't be related to your network speed. What email app are you using?

Yahoo on the web.  

Every time there is a big problem with Yahoo, the attitude is that it seems likely that Yahoo will fix it. And then another problem happens.

Tom_Reingold said:

Every time there is a big problem with Yahoo, the attitude is that it seems likely that Yahoo will fix it. And then another problem happens.

If I were starting off fresh, I would not do it with Yahoo. And if it was a domain address, I would certainly move it somewhere else, but I didn't know about those when I set it up.  The effort I would have to go through now to switch to another provider is just not something I can take on right now.  The yahoo email address is embedded in virtually every "account" I have with any other business.  I DO have other email addresses and use them for various purposes, but this is the one that is my login (or at least notification email) for all the websites I visit and use - Facebook, Amazon, frequent traveler accounts, online shopping accounts, etc. ... probably over 100 different ones.

I have a 'friends and family only' email address but I refuse to ever type it into a website or have it published anywhere, so there is a pretty good chunk of correspondence that I would not move there.  Perhaps I should set up another email account for that "intermediate" level of correspondence, but I haven't decided to do that and that is also not a trivial effort.

I will say that Yahoo seems to do a better job than Gmail with spam filtering.  For a little while I was rerouting my Yahoo mail to a gmail address I have in order to try out gmail, but I became discouraged at the level of spam there.  Maybe I just didn't have the settings right, but it was bad.

OK. Sounds like your FIOS is fine. Your opening post mentioned more than Yahoo Mail and that's why I went down the 'service' path. The new router should help a lot for the wireless speed. Not really any reason you shouldn't get the full 75/75 service unless your wireless bandwidth is being heavily used by other devices. Apologies for the ads too. I don't see them on my browser (Ghostery/Adblock).

Hopefully you've changed the yahoo password since the last security breach. I believe it's been stated that all accounts were compromised.

I'm in the same situation as @sac -- Yahoo is my primary address for personal use (and has been for many many years), and though it's clearly gone downhill, I'm not ready to make the change.

Sir_Dave said:

OK. Sounds like your FIOS is fine. Your opening post mentioned more than Yahoo Mail and that's why I went down the 'service' path. The new router should help a lot for the wireless speed. Not really any reason you shouldn't get the full 75/75 service unless your wireless bandwidth is being heavily used by other devices. Apologies for the ads too. I don't see them on my browser (Ghostery/Adblock).

Hopefully you've changed the yahoo password since the last security breach. I believe it's been stated that all accounts were compromised.

Yes, I've changed the password every time that has happened (and a few other times for good measure.)  I decided to try taking Yahoo out of my list of startup browser tabs and it seems to have improved the performance of other tabs.  I am defaulting to using a different browser for Yahoo now.  We'll see if that helps.

If you are still using yahoo, start planning to move it somewhere else. Google, Outlook, whatever. Especially using it as the authentication for other services is IMHO risky with all the yahoo security issues over the years. (And why would that change). As well as the real chance that yahoo might one day not exist anymore as we know it.

I've been saying for a long time that changing your address isn't as hard as you think. And I've recently learned how very wrong I am about that. I'm changing my email address now, and it is taking months. On the other hand, nothing has broken. I'm planning to forward the old mail to the new address once I've reached a certain level of satisfaction, but I want to wait. Once I make the forward, I might never notify some of my business accounts of my new address.

But what earlster says (and what I've been saying for a long time) is true: move. Move now or move eventually, but move. Yahoo has been screwing people up, and it is sure to happen again. Not that google is guaranteed to be better. One of these days, it will be the evil company everyone wants to avoid. That's why a custom domain is nice: Host your mail (and stuff) on google today and on some other company later. So don't use an email address that is the name of your email provider, and certainly not the name of your ISP.

Tom_Reingold said:

I've been saying for a long time that changing your address isn't as hard as you think. And I've recently learned how very wrong I am about that. I'm changing my email address now, and it is taking months. On the other hand, nothing has broken. I'm planning to forward the old mail to the new address once I've reached a certain level of satisfaction, but I want to wait. Once I make the forward, I might never notify some of my business accounts of my new address.

But what earlster says (and what I've been saying for a long time) is true: move. Move now or move eventually, but move. Yahoo has been screwing people up, and it is sure to happen again. Not that google is guaranteed to be better. One of these days, it will be the evil company everyone wants to avoid. That's why a custom domain is nice: Host your mail (and stuff) on google today and on some other company later. So don't use an email address that is the name of your email provider, and certainly not the name of your ISP.

How do you configure gmail to filter spam as well as Yahoo?  When I was autoforwarding all my Yahoo mail to gmail, I had orders of magnitude more junk in my gmail inbox than Yahoo.

That's weird! Generally, you don't have to configure google's spam filter. It just works.

And now there's this to look into

With the continuing collapse in online advertising revenues, websites are turning to other methods to pay their hosting bills – including using visitors’ computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency.

It’s a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor’s computers, but it is a potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors’ machines, and at worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/pirate-bay-showtime-ads-websites-electricity-pay-bills-cryptocurrency-bitcoin?CMP=twt_gu