wget yields slow speeds when upgrading 2.6.9 to 2.6.18

[iwmaster]

I am posting in the general Linux networking, instead of CentOS as I have tried and experienced the behavior described below with various implementations. (OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS).

A strange issue. We were running CentOS 4.6 (linux 2.6.9) on our servers. Recently we decided to upgrade the servers to CentOS 5.3. The upgrade went well, except we noticed that the yum update was extremely slow. This led to some further investigation, and when we compared the "wget" speed (wget -O /tmp/TEST "http : // www dslreports com /mspeed?t=1&s=100&w=" ) between the new CentOS 5 and the old CentOS 4 servers, we found some major speed differences.

CentOS 4: 37.33 K/s
CentOS 5:    944 B/s (yes ... bytes/sec)

Now, when we did some FTP tests (to and from both servers), network file copy tests (over NFS and Samba), the speeds between the two servers were comparable ... except for the web traffic.

Any ideas? I can provide any info (ifconfig, ethtool, lspci, dmesg etc.) as requested.

Here is the traceroute details to start with

CentOS 4:
$ traceroute -n www dslreports com
traceroute to www dslreports com (209.123.109.175), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  172.26.254.254  0.790 ms  0.809 ms  0.668 ms
 2  172.26.190.254  1.532 ms  1.439 ms  1.440 ms
 3  172.26.249.1  1.908 ms  1.738 ms  2.148 ms
 4  172.26.182.4  1.604 ms  1.659 ms  1.176 ms
 5  172.26.145.3  1.876 ms  1.830 ms  1.592 ms
 6  155.178.180.101  2.443 ms  2.355 ms  2.201 ms
 7  155.178.181.11  2.816 ms  2.999 ms  3.040 ms
 8  10.147.2.4  1.914 ms  1.840 ms  1.815 ms
 9  155.178.4.1  2.166 ms  1.987 ms  2.644 ms
10  4.78.147.69  5.784 ms  4.966 ms  2.962 ms
11  209.247.9.37  3.390 ms  3.639 ms  3.295 ms
12  4.68.128.137  6.049 ms  5.602 ms  6.599 ms
13  4.68.99.5  6.075 ms 4.68.99.37  5.991 ms  6.455 ms
14  4.79.189.74  6.667 ms  5.912 ms  6.669 ms
15  209.123.10.126  7.873 ms  6.738 ms  6.882 ms
16  209.123.10.42  7.023 ms  6.845 ms  6.780 ms
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CentOS 5:
$ traceroute -n www dslreports com
traceroute to www dslreports com (209.123.109.175), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  172.26.254.254  1.730 ms  1.897 ms  2.666 ms
 2  172.26.190.254  3.942 ms  4.175 ms  5.368 ms
 3  172.26.249.1  6.390 ms  7.190 ms  8.043 ms
 4  172.26.182.3  8.572 ms  9.589 ms  11.189 ms
 5  172.26.145.3  11.235 ms  11.485 ms  12.805 ms
 6  155.178.180.101  14.420 ms  13.859 ms  14.249 ms
 7  155.178.181.11  36.432 ms  35.079 ms  35.412 ms
 8  10.147.2.4  13.070 ms  12.098 ms  11.788 ms
 9  155.178.4.1  11.172 ms  10.586 ms  12.139 ms
10  4.78.147.69  11.496 ms  11.417 ms  11.733 ms
11  209.247.9.37  11.053 ms  9.623 ms  9.041 ms
12  4.68.128.137  11.607 ms 4.68.128.146  10.228 ms 4.68.128.137  11.654 ms
13  4.68.99.5  11.764 ms  11.734 ms 4.68.99.37  17.078 ms
14  4.79.189.74  14.777 ms  13.844 ms  13.572 ms
15  209.123.10.126  13.131 ms  12.511 ms  12.369 ms
16  209.123.10.42  12.104 ms  20.397 ms  19.452 ms
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Thanks

[iwmaster]

ping Anybody have any clues?