I have a server co-located with eFreeServers.com. One day I was working in SSH and I noticed that the connection suddenly became very sluggish. After doing some tests it turns out there was like 20% packet loss to my server. So I wrote a simple perl script that would ping my server every 3 minutes and log the results. After running it for several weeks weeks now, I can see that EFS is having regular packet loss every couple of weeks for several hours. Today is the worst day yet -- it started at around 7am PST and it is still losing packets (5.5 hours later). I e-mailed support, and the reply was "could you please send us your traceroute and ping tests so we can forward it to our upstream providers". So they basically had no clue that there was severe packet loss in their network. As far as I can tell the packet loss starts as soon as it enters Cogent hops. So I would like to find out if it is Cogent to blame or is it EFS. If somebody has direct connection to Cogent, do you see any packet loss whatsoever? Specifically if your server is located in San Francisco or the Bay Area? Private message please or just reply here.

wow, even their main site seems very slow. I get a 90+ ms ping time to them from my server. I don't see any packet loss just a high ping.

[rikt@freedom rikt]$ traceroute www.efreeservers.com
traceroute to www.efreeservers.com (63.211.153.68), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 aggr1.rackspace.com (209.61.157.194) 0.470 ms 0.403 ms 0.361 ms
2 ge4-0.edge2.sat.rackspace.com (64.39.2.38) 0.294 ms 0.329 ms 0.278 ms
3 12.124.219.57 (12.124.219.57) 2.222 ms 1.852 ms 1.815 ms
4 gbr1-p70.auttx.ip.att.net (12.123.133.22) 1.887 ms 1.894 ms 1.879 ms
5 gbr4-p10.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.2.109) 5.830 ms 5.701 ms 5.719 ms
6 ggr1-p370.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.123.16.245) 5.869 ms 5.746 ms 5.766 ms
7 pos1-3.core1.Dallas1.Level3.net (209.245.240.173) 6.023 ms 6.060 ms 5.984 ms
8 so-4-0-0.mp1.Dallas1.Level3.net (209.247.10.97) 6.336 ms 6.266 ms 6.224 ms
9 so-2-0-0.mp1.SanFrancisco1.Level3.net (64.159.0.242) 55.700 ms 55.608 ms 55.625 ms
10 pos8-0.core2.SanFrancisco1.Level3.net (209.247.10.230) 54.399 ms 54.134 ms 54.096 ms
11 gigabitethernet6-0.ipcolo2.SanFrancisco1.Level3.net (209.244.14.46) 53.976 ms 53.920 ms 54.005 ms
12 eContinents.demarc.cogentco.com (66.28.28.82) 90.904 ms 89.684 ms 90.100 ms
13 gigabitethernet.bgp4-QwestLink.Level3.net (65.56.42.253) 90.413 ms 90.516 ms 90.123 ms
14 www.efreeservers.com (63.211.153.68) 90.563 ms 90.029 ms 91.766 ms


sorry it looks so ugly, but starting at hop 9 the SanFran Level 3 hop it slows down.

Here's how you can see the packet loss:

http://beacon.webtv.net/cgi-bin/nph-ping.cgi?host=efreeservers.com&data=1500&pkts=30

Right now it is at 18%.