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Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

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Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#71

Post by gerdesj »

water-your-self wrote: post #63
jl6 wrote: post #46

> Is there a way I can test this more scientifically? How 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…

Just have ping running in the background. You can observe the difference yourself

Ping tests the possibility of connectivity and can provide a hint at latency. That is not a speed test.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#74

Post by bragr »

dboreham wrote: post #68

Unlikely your suspicions are correct. Provisioning high QoS to the speedtest site is common practice (see fast.com for countermeasures), but changing the entire subscriber QoS because traffic to one particular destination is detected seems like too much work and doesn't really achieve anything useful. If you are on a wireless network (either your upstream from a WISP, or internally on your own network), then I'd susp…

This should be easy to test. Find a a big file somewhere served reasonably fast and see if you can replicate the results while pulling it down. Maybe some Linux distro ISO? I really doubt an ISP would optimize that.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#75

Post by WanderPanda »

traceroute66 wrote: post #56
vmception wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast doesnt do upload

> Fast doesnt do upload It does but it's hidden, you have to hit "Show more info" (once the main test has finished). A bit stupid, but I'm sure some committee thought it was an awesome idea to do it that way.

Makes sense to me. The point is that the speed test traffic pretends to be netflix traffic which is mainly download. The upload to other servers could be limited by the ISP while being unlocked for netflix with low cost (because people don‘t upload a lot towards netflix). So there is less signal in the fast.com upload speed measurement

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#76

Post by withinboredom »

lostlogin wrote: post #47
jonnycomputer wrote: post #6

So the trick is to always be running a speed-test in the background?

I nearly did this, but because I was having connection issues. I got it to post to Slack every 15 mins and to post to an alert channel if speed was less than a certain value (something like 3Mbps, crazy low). I would log the fault from work and it would be fixed by the time I got home. However I have fibre now, and it’s glorious. No crap scripts required (though it still runs!).

Sounds like the speed tests are filling your buffers, allowing your router to do proper QOS and prioritize your packets correctly. Do you have QOS turned on? You might want to turn it off since it sounds misconfigured.

You can check here: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#77

Post by aaomidi »

ranger207 wrote: post #26

Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...

I mean, it's a bit of an odd choice because it's pretty easy to detect if a user has "opened fast.com in the past few minutes"

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#79

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

bfz wrote: post #13
CursedUrn wrote: post #8

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…

This sounds awesome!
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