friday night, moving a site off shared hosting onto a droplet. rsync running, ttl already dropped, all going fine. then the transfer speed fell off a cliff and i spent twenty minues blaming the old host, ran traceroutes, wrote half an angry email to their support.
it was my own machine. the crimson desert preload had kicked off on steam in the backgroud and was pulling about 70gb down at whatever speed it could get. the rsync was going through my laptop because i was pulling from one server and pushing to the other instead of running it server to server like a sane person.
two things came out of that. one, run the transfer between the two boxes directly in tmux, then shut the laptop and go to bed, there is no reason for your home line to be in the path at all. two, my dns ttl sat at 300 for hours longer than it needed to because the copy took so long, and that is its own kind of stupid.
it finished at 6am and nobody noticed anything, so on paper it went fine. the client asked me the next day whether it had been worth moving at all, since the site felt the same to him.
short version, check what your own machine is doing before you go looking for the clever explanation
Source: r/SiteOptimization · by /u/harri_builds