Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could speed test sites do something about this? Like obfuscate the traffic somehow to get more genuine results?
It's possible to build a speed test site out of media file fetches from otherwise public assets from third party sites, the quality of the measurement will just be a little noisier. In many ways this would actually be a better test than some well-placed IP address, since there is a chance to randomly sample many different routes from the ISP to real world destinations for practical object sizes (i.e., not just an ide…
Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
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Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#42Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#43i am using spectrum business and i’ve been paying close to $200/m. this is in LA in a residential building. the speed looks good when i run a test but i notice that page loading times are total shit at least initially. if i start a download for a video game that ramps up quickly in speed but i actually don’t need that. what i really want is very fast resolving and page loading, which is different than just large down…
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when connected to an in-country vpn endpoint. Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?
> I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping? Better routes. Most latency on the internet is not due to c.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#45I was on the phone with a buddy trying to troubleshoot Local file transfer speeds vs Speedtest results. Speedtest kept reporting 100Mb/s range speeds (the tier he was paying for). Local file transfers however were stuck in the 1MB/s range. After some questions and troubleshooting he discovered that he had used a 10Mb/s hub instead of a 1Gb/s switch that was sitting right next to it. A simple mixup. His internet conne…
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#46How about the following?:
1. Choose a dozen or so public files on hosts known to have high bandwidth (Google or Microsoft perhaps). Maybe choose a couple of public legal torrents too.
2. Write a script to download all the chosen files (either sequentially or concurrently), and emit timing information.
3. Run that script a couple of times a day at random times. Try to cover weekdays and weekends, days and nights.
4. Repeat 3 but running a speed test first each time. See if there is any statistically significant difference.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#47So the trick is to always be running a speed-test in the background?
However I have fibre now, and it’s glorious. No crap scripts required (though it still runs!).
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#48Another weird one: Open fast.com and check your speed. Now reload the page and and run it again but as soon as it starts, open another tab and do some browsing. The second test gives me higher speeds consistently.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#49My ISP does the prioritization whenever you do a DNS lookup for speedtest.net. You don't actually need to run the test.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#50i am using spectrum business and i’ve been paying close to $200/m. this is in LA in a residential building. the speed looks good when i run a test but i notice that page loading times are total shit at least initially. if i start a download for a video game that ramps up quickly in speed but i actually don’t need that. what i really want is very fast resolving and page loading, which is different than just large down…
Some background: If you study traffic shaping, you'll discover that TCP behaves poorly if packets are simply dropped when throughput approaches the limit (congestion collapse). So traffic shaping usually _delays_ packets rather than dropping, at least initially. This works in that TCP backs off its send rate gracefully and throughput approaches the provisioned limit. However you've now introduced a large delay into every packet's transit through the shaper box. This isn't a problem for bulk TCP flows -- they work ok in the presence of latency but it is problematic for unrelated latency sensitive traffic (e.g. UDP, SSH). To work around this problem traffic shaping usually introduces some notion of delay per flow. This can be done in a few different ways e.g. RED (random early detection), or per-flow queues.
Ok so back to Spectrum: my experience has been that their shaper box does not do anything good as far as per-flow queues, RED etc. It seems pretty basic and dumb. The result is that latency approaches infinity as throughput approaches the provisioned limit.
I work around this by deploying my own shaping on my edge router. Through experiment, I have configured it to limit at just below the threshold where Spectrum begins severely delaying my traffic. I use RED on my router to give good latency for traffic unrelated to bulk flows. You'll need a router capable of traffic shaping, e.g. Mikrotik, Linux iptraf, Cisco IOS.