Originally Posted by
STS-134
My wife was having issues with the A "Japan 3" server last night. I was on a video call with her (using AC as the VPN on her phone) and her laptop kept experiencing high packet loss to Japan 3 and would sometimes refuse to connect. Simultaneously while this was all going on, I was able to connect to the same Japan 3 server, run a speed test through it (during which I got download speeds of above 85 Mbps), and was only seeing about 0.1-1% packet loss except packet loss on ICMP was as high as 6% during the speed tests themselves. So Japan 3 itself was not having any issues. Furthermore, both of us ran traceroutes from our computers to the Japan 3 server IP addresses and even though A seemingly configures the servers to not respond to any packets that aren't legitimate VPN related packets, we were both able to see that our packets were making it to Tokyo. So conclusion was that it wasn't an issue with the IP address. I'm not sure if it was a bandwidth oversale issue or something malicious instead because my wife didn't want to do a Wireshark capture of an A session on Japan 3 at that moment.
EDIT: I should add that after we did all of this testing, she connected to A's Los Angeles server instead of Japan 3 and everything was working through that server instead. Although that server was getting higher ping times to the gaming server she was using (US east coast) than Japan 3 usually gets.
I suggest you advise your wife to do a limited speed test (full test is and just save the top 20 results is also okay if she has time). To sort, she can export to CSV, open in excel, and the use the text to columns wizard. I usually sort by ping, but sometimes, I make a new index column that combines ping with bandwidth (not really necessary because it's easy to eyeball the results; fast ping with low bandwidth is not a winner). It's important that she has this data in hand before contacting support because those guys have no way of knowing the best performing servers are from her specific connection (they just know what works best from China as a whole).
However, she should describe her specific situation to them via chat and they will suggest a handful of servers to her, which she can cross check against her own list.
I've never had to wait for more than 2 minutes to get connected to an agent, and chats rarely take longer than 10 minutes. I'm still using Portland now because it's one of the 3 US servers they recommended to me last week. (Dallas and Denver 1 were the other two). Japan/Korea//Taiwan/HK would need to be a lot better for me to consider them. The only time I use non-US servers is when I encounter sites that dislike US-IP addresses, and in these cases, I gravitate towards countries in Western Europe that have liberal policies in this regard.
ETA: The guy I spoke with last week (Mark) told me that my my insistence on being wedded to Santa Clara exclusively was unnecessarily stubborn because their company doesn't have the resources to guarantee than all of their servers are working flawlessly at all times, but after my specific report, they went to work fixing SC. I've always assumed A was a smaller company than Exp or Nord because I rarely see their ads or mention on blog sites.
Edit2: flyertalk.com is a great site to test your short list of servers with because its Clouflare settings are the most sensitive I've ever experienced. Servers that it doesn't reject are less likely to trigger google puzzles IME.