Uploading a file takes longer for the user than me

Question

I have a really weird problem, and I'm running out of ideas about what could be causing.

I have a page on my site that allows users to upload photos to the site. I have a specific user who says it takes about 2 minutes to upload a photo. However, when it uploads the same photo to flickr, it takes about 20 seconds. He provided me with a photo, I logged into his account and used the same web browser and found that it took only 20 seconds to download the same file!

It runs IE9, Windows 7 64bit, a decent computer, and it is not on the other side of the world. We are approximately the same distance from the server.

Any ideas what could be the problem or other things I should check out?

Answer 1

It can also be a routing product. If its isp doesn’t have an agreement with your website host, traffic can go a narrow way. You can ask the traceroute user against your host and see if anything strange appears. Internet providers control the outbound route, so the user can download from your site at the right speed, while the other way can go slowly.