AOL > Cogent Traffic Sluggish....

We use Cogent at our colo, and since this Monday (8/13/07) we've been gettin dozens of complaints from AOL users stating that connections to our sites are very, very slow and often time out.

We tested from an AOL session and were able to confirm this. We found this odd, because it came out of the blue and nothing had changed on our end. We also get excellent all-around performance from other (non AOL) connections, be it dialup or broadband.

We went ahead and did a bunch of traceroutes on the AOL session. We found things get bogged down as soon as it hits Cogent's routers in DC (timeouts / no response). These AOL sessions have no problems whatsoever with other sites and other (non cogent hosted sites) loaded fast and without issue. We then tested loading Cogent's own web site from the AOL session and saw the same sluggishness as well. The same happened when we tested a couple other Cogent client sites from AOL. They all pulled very slow (10 to 35+ secs per page) on an AOL/DSL session. This did not happen on the same broadband connection w/out AOL running on top of it. The same pages loaded very fast.

Just wondering if other Cogent clients are experiencing this? :? We have not heard from them about this, but wanted to know if this is something isolated or not.