Browsers works slow when VPN is turned OFF (infinitely better when it's ON)

VPN
1

I am encountering a very, very strange issue.

I have a Dell XPS15 9530 with an i7, an RTX 4050, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM.

One day, while watching YouTube and doing nothing out of the ordinary, it crashed with the VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE error BSOD. After that, it booted back up with seemingly no issues, but the videos on YouTube kept playing at 144p and only for about 3 seconds before freezing. I noted that changing the browser does not help, and videos on other (non-YouTube) websites wouldn’t work, either, regardless of whether the video itself is a YouTube embed or has a completely different source. Please note that videos “physically” on the computer (saved on my SSD) work perfectly fine with no issues. I’ve also loaded up a few games, and they work just fine, with no issues or performance drops. Other applications that require an internet connection (e.g., Discord, Steam) also work fine.

TL;DR: Only the browsers are acting up and working slowly; the computer seems fine otherwise.

Non-exhaustive list of websites that are experiencing issues:

  • YouTube
  • DeepL translator
  • Google Translate
  • ChatGPT
  • Explain Everything (platform for professors to publish videos for students to watch)

These have been accessed by both Google and Edge, so merely changing the browser does not help.

Stuff I’ve done between then and now:

  • Restarted the system (many, many times)
  • Reinstalled and clean installed graphics drivers for both Nvidia and Intel
  • Ran both quick full system checks by both SupportAssist (Dell’s proprietary software) and Windows
  • Ran a virus check by both Windows and Avast (free)
  • Reinstalled the current version of Windows via Settings → System → Recovery → Reinstall now
  • Verified internet speeds via Ookla speedtest.
  • Reinstalled Chrome
  • Disabled and enabled hardware acceleration in Chrome
  • Disabled and enabled JavaScript
  • Disabled, uninstalled, and reinstalled all Chrome plugins
  • Put Chrome out of efficiency mode
  • Checked every driver and key program (like the browsers and Dell programs) for updates
  • Checked Windows for updates

Please note that the reason I’m using a lot of the Dell programs is that when trying to update Intel drivers, the Intel website has directed me to use Dell’s version of the software rather than Intel’s because Dell may have modified drivers to work best with their machines (or something of that sort).

After all of that, the issue still wasn’t fixed.

I then accidentally enabled my VPN (ZenMate) and… It worked! The videos are playing almost as normal now! A little slower than before this mess started, but at normal speeds for using the VPN.

Problem is, this is a hotfix. I am trying to find a permanent solution and find the cause of the behavior described above. Any help is appreciated!

Thank you in advance,

A terrified college student.

2

If you suspect you may have malware on your computer, or are trying to remove malware from your computer, please see our malware guide

Please ignore this message if the advice is not relevant.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

3

Are there any other devices connected to the same network that are experiencing similar issues? Or is it only your PC?

Usually if web content from specific websites seems slow to load/buffer and this only happens when your VPN is turned off, this would indicate that your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) network routes to those web servers are congested, but your ISP’s network routes to the VPN server are not congested. There may be other possible explanations, but the likelihood of the problem being related to your PC or browser is low if it only impacts specific websites and only when your VPN is turned off.

The VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE error is most likely a separate issue connected to a problem with the graphics card or graphics card driver (though you noted that you re-installed the drivers).

I can’t see why slow loading/buffering on certain websites would cause a VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE error, or why a problem with the graphics card/driver would cause slow loading/buffering on certain websites.

Out of interest, what sort of test results do you get when you perform speed tests against a variety of different servers (services like speedtest.net let you choose a server to test against).

4

please consult your ISP they can help. ask them to maybe try to reroute your connection. also try to use different public DNS servers

5

Getting dump files which we need for accurate analysis of BSODs. Dump files are crash logs from BSODs.

If you can get into Windows normally or through Safe Mode could you check C:\Windows\Minidump for any dump files? If you have any dump files, copy the folder to the desktop, zip the folder and upload it. If you don’t have any zip software installed, right click on the folder and select Send to → Compressed (Zipped) folder.

Upload to any easy to use file sharing site. Reddit keeps blacklisting file hosts so find something that works, currently catbox.moe or mediafire.com seems to be working.

We like to have multiple dump files to work with so if you only have one dump file, none or not a folder at all, upload the ones you have and then follow this guide to change the dump type to Small Memory Dump. The “Overwrite dump file” option will be grayed out since small memory dumps never overwrite.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

6

Solved it! Turns out that my Antivirus apparently got banged up by the crash, and the web protection services were interfering with the browsers. Explains everything, really, except the crash itself. Nothing to worry about, though, as they haven’t happened since.

A huge thank you to everyone for your help! Blessed to have people like you around.

7

At my old apartment, YouTube would load slow AF, UNLESS I connected to my VPN. Never could figure out why. This post reminded me of that.

I wonder if it’s the ISP (in OP’s case, and mine) purposefully slowing things, for whatever reason.

8

I have tried connecting to two networks, one from my college itself and eduroam, a network that multiple colleges share. I have also tried multiple devices on both networks. The other devices work fine, on both networks; it’s only my laptop that has an issue.

As for the error, perhaps I should’ve explained this earlier; right before the BSOD, my video slowed down significantly, started lagging, and then the computer crashed. Since I started noticing similar “symptoms” on other videos, I thought that the issues were related, so I did all the driver stuff. As you pointed out, that probably wasn’t the issue, as I later found out.

As for test results (download/upload/ping):

  1. (207.53 / 202.79 / 11)

  2. (194.92 / 226.16 / 11)

  3. (158.11 / 170.21 / 14)

9

I’ll try, thank you!

10

Yeah, it’s most likely the fault of the ISP, but not necessarily the result of intentional throttling (slowing down).

Basically ISPs have two ways of routing internet traffic to their destination. They can either pay for IP transit (where they connect to a company that specializes in delivering traffic to networks all around the world, for a fee)… or they can peer directly with the destination network and exchange traffic freely (if the destination network allows it and the ISP and destination network both have presence in the same internet exchange facility).

So basically what happens is that many ISPs will peer directly with the big content providers like Google/YouTube, Netflix, etc. so that they (the ISP) can route all the traffic from those networks/services to their (the ISP’s) customers for free. And then they will use (paid) IP transit to handle all the other traffic for networks they don’t peer with directly.

This means, however, that as the ISP customer base and bandwidth requirements grow, the peering circuits connecting the ISP to those other networks (like to Google/YouTube) need to be periodically upgraded (which costs money). So, for example, maybe they start with a 2 Gbps circuit, and then later need to move up to a 10 Gbps circuit, then 20, 40, 100, etc. to keep up with the increasing bandwidth requirements.

The issue is that if the ISP doesn’t keep up (e.g. due to laziness, poor logistics, cost cutting, etc.), the bandwidth usage may start to exceed the capacity of the peering circuit — and that’s when you get congestion. In other words, during peak times, there will effectively be a traffic jam on the circuit causing the ISP’s customers to experience poor/slow performance when connecting to services hosted on that particular network (Google/YouTube’s network in this example).

11

To clarify, does the problem only happen with videos? Are downloads and page load times seemingly unaffected?

I’m wondering if this is possibly unrelated to your network connection and instead just an issue with the graphics card rendering/displaying frames from online videos. Some websites, like YouTube, may also automatically downgrade the video resolution when they detect interrupted/problematic playback, which may explain why YouTube switched to 144p.

Regarding the VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE error, as I understand it this usually results from a situation where Windows thinks the GPU has frozen so it basically tells the GPU to quickly wrap up what it’s doing and reset. However, if the GPU doesn’t respond by finishing up and resetting within the allotted time frame (default 2 seconds), then computer will crash with a BSOD & VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE error. So this typically only happens if the GPU is doing something very intense (or has some sort of hardware/driver failure) that causes it to stop responding completely for 2+ seconds.

I’m also wondering whether the issue may be related to specific video codecs. Modern graphics cards have specialized (and highly optimized) hardware for decoding specific video formats. Most videos you download to your computer are probably encoded with H.264 (a very popular and widely-supported codec), but in recent years many websites — like YouTube — have started experimenting with other codecs like VP9 and AV1 for improved efficiency and other benefits. Sometimes videos encoded with HDR or other special/unusual features can also cause similar problems.

So let’s say, for example, the hardware in your graphics card is having trouble decoding a video that was encoded with a particular codec (e.g. AV1). This is a case where all the websites with video using that codec may cause trouble, while other sites (and local videos on your computer encoded with H.264 for example) cause no trouble.

I’m not sure though why turning on and off the VPN would have such an impact if the problem is only related to the graphics card.

One other thing I would recommend trying is Firefox. Most browsers these days (e.g. Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.) are all based on the same Chromium source code and Blink rendering engine, so a bug/issue on one of these browsers may also impact the others the same way.

Firefox is one of the only browsers with a completely separate/independent code base and rendering engine (Gecko), so it’s worth a try to see if it behaves differently.

Note that Safari also uses a different rendering engine (Webkit), but Chromium’s Blink engine is actually derived from (an earlier version of) Webkit, so there will still be some shared code between Safari and Chromium-based browsers like Chrome or Edge.

12

Thank you very much for your response!

I must agree, by this point, I highly doubt that the GPU or its drivers are the issue. While some aspects may seem like it, the fact that using a VPN virtually nullifies the issue is very uncharacteristic for a GPU problem, especially since MORE GPU-demanding tasks, like running video games, run smoothly.

To clarify, it’s not just videos. Certain websites, such as Chat GPT, Google Translate and DeepL translator were affected, too. I’m assuming it’s because they have to handle dynamic inputs, and produce output based on the user’s input, which would most likely take up a lot of the (apparently) scarce traffic.

I’ll give Firefox a try and get back to you on how that goes.

Again, thank you very much for your support and explanations.