

Ask HN: Is this even possible? - da5e

Every morning about 6 am, Hawaii  time, the internet seems to slow way down. Is it possible that because it is 9 am on the West Coast and 12 pm on the East Coast that there is a surge of use on those coasts that slows it down?
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anigbrowl
It's possible, but you'd need to measure it somehow. If your hunch is correct,
then the effect should not show up on weekends and holidays. One low-impact
way to measure it might be to write a little script that pings a few specific
hosts every minute or 5 minutes and tracks the reply time. Run it for a few
weeks and graph the results.

I remember years back working for an electricity generator and wondering why
we had a spike every evening between 5 and 6 - sure, I thought, with people
leaving work consumption should be down? turns out that electric kettles and
domestic televisions draw more current in the aggregate than office equipment.

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chc
It's not completely impossible in theory (lots of people all doing something
at once could have an effect on common infrastructure), but since nobody else
seems to have ever noticed the phenomenon — even those for whom the effects
would be occurring locally rather than diluted by distance — it doesn't appear
to be the case. Maybe your ISP takes the time to do maintenance and
diagnostics. That seems more likely.

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da5e
Thanks I'll do more checking.

