# How do I make my internet faster in general ?

## West201

I know I can't get more than what I'm paying for, and thats not what I want. I live in a small town (20,000 pop), and there are only two ISPs in my area.  I used to be able to download at 300 kb/s but now the last few months I've only been able to download at 90 kb/s. I called my ISP, but they are not very helpful, they said changing the proxies will help. I don't know much about Networking and I'm looking for an application that can possibly be able to detect the best proxy for my router. 

Thanks,

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## NeddySeagoon

JESSEJJ89,

You can't beat your pipe to the internet - all you can do it to improve your apparent speed.

How useful that is depends on what you use the internet for.

e.g. squid will cache sites you vist - and on second and subsequent visits, pages will be serverd from the cache.

It asks the pasge when it was last changed to make sure you don't get stage pages.

Run an ad blocker - this saves wasted bandwidth loading ads you don't want to see.

Run http-replicator if you have several gentoo installs - it caches your distfile downloads.

Run your own rsync mirror, so you have that cached.

Do you have a proxy set up now?

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## West201

I don't have a proxy set up. I'm connected through the ethernet cable. I've seen several videos on YT on how to increase internet speed using proxies with Windows. I just installed squid and I'm looking for a tutorial that shows you how to use it.

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## b0nafide

It's possible that you're experiencing this because of a faulty length of cable, problems with your modem, router, etc. So it's best to troubleshoot with your ISP (maybe you'll get somebody different if you pursue it).  

It's helpful for them if you have already done tests with tools such as speedtest.net (preferably without a router involved).

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## NeddySeagoon

JESSEJJ89,

What does 

```
ifconfg
```

 show ?

```
/sbin/ifconfig 

eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500  metric 1

        inet 192.168.100.20  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.100.255

        inet6 fe80::224:8cff:fe2a:6385  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>

        ether 00:24:8c:2a:63:85  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)

        RX packets 132396  bytes 50786152 (48.4 MiB)

        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0

        TX packets 110492  bytes 9387677 (8.9 MiB)

        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 1  collisions 0

        device interrupt 44 
```

In particular RX errors and TX errors.  These cause retries, which reduces your overall data rate.

What is your mtu ?   

```
mtu 1500
```

is normal for ethernet.  IF you use PPPoE its too big and will cause packet fragmentation.

For PPPoE use mtu 1492.  Fragmentaion hurts your data rate as you use more packets than your would otherwise and every packet has a header, which is just overhead.

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## West201

This is the output from if config

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr e0:69:95:c0:0e:fd  

          inet addr:192.168.1.64  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

          inet6 addr: fe80::e269:95ff:fec0:efd/64 Scope:Link

          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

          RX packets:2589 errors:0 dropped:2 overruns:0 frame:0

          TX packets:2610 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 

          RX bytes:1573297 (1.5 MiB)  TX bytes:365879 (357.3 KiB)

          Interrupt:40 Base address:0x8000 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  

          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0

          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host

          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1

          RX packets:480 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

          TX packets:480 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 

          RX bytes:37520 (36.6 KiB)  TX bytes:37520 (36.6 KiB)

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## PaulBredbury

A good trick using iptables is to optimize the output queue order.

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## NeddySeagoon

JESSEJJ89,

Your hardware looks good. Two dropped packets won't be noticable.

Its worth playing with reducing your mtu to see what effect that has. The optimum size depends on workload.

Fetching files will be best with the largest MTU (fewest packets) your link will support.

For IRC, packets are small, so you won't see any difference.

Running Quality of Service (QoS) is only good if you have the bandwidth anyway. It does not make a slow link faster.

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