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Building fast.com

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: Building fast.com

#91

Post by figgis »

nkozyra wrote: post #86
IshKebab wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah right. Just wait until a user visits fast.com and unthrottle their connection for 20 minutes. I strongly suspect some ISPs already do that with speedtest.net.

Note to self: set up cronjob to ping speedtest.net and fast.com every 10 minutes, just in case.

I did that, works great and with speed test cli it (did it without that at first) it's even better!

https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli

If you are going to setup a cronjob/service for it, I suggest using the --simple flag.

Re: Building fast.com

#94

Post by a1k0n »

douglasfshearer wrote: post #44
zackbloom wrote: post #40

It's a little odd that they elected to invent their own way of requesting just a range of bytes in a file. It's built into HTTP: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7233

YouTube also put the byte range in the URL rather than using a range request header. Perhaps it mitigates against proxies stripping the headers, or it simplifies caching.

I tried to use the Range header feature to resume downloads in an autoupdating app once, and it worked beautifully...for about 90% of users; the others had all kinds of weird issues thanks to transparent proxies and caches not handling the Range header correctly. This was years ago, but I'm not surprised they chose to be safer than sorry.

Re: Building fast.com

#95

Post by blakeyrat »

dpcx wrote: post #90
blakeyrat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reports from your location are not available yet." Uh, I didn't tell you my location, Google... what the heck?

They can guesstimate by geolocating your IP.

The problem is I'm at work right now, and I wanted to get results for where I live not where I work. (Which might still be unavailable, given, but at least let me type it in!)

Re: Building fast.com

#96

Post by [deleted] »

joeblau wrote: post #49
mofle wrote: post #17

You can also run fast.com from the command-line: https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli

This is cool; just ran it, but I couldn't tell that it was doing anything. Maybe adding some soft of indicator/throbber that lets you know it's processing. fast | cat 860 Mbps

[deleted]

Re: Building fast.com

#97

Post by Buge »

ajamesm wrote: post #69
Buge wrote: post #21

I seem to be unable to view the blog post in Firefox, it automatically goes to https which doesn't load. Maybe netflix messed up their HSTS settings at some point in the past?

I'm also experiencing the same (also using HTTPS everywhere). Disabling the extension doesn't seem to work. If you get a solution, please let me know.

I found that Noscript was causing it.

The best solution is to go into Noscript options > advanced > HTTPS and add .netflix.com to "Never force secure".

The other way is to go into about:config and set noscript.httpsDefWhitelist to false. But that's less secure.

Re: Building fast.com

#98

Post by mi100hael »

joeblau wrote: post #49
mofle wrote: post #17

You can also run fast.com from the command-line: https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli

This is cool; just ran it, but I couldn't tell that it was doing anything. Maybe adding some soft of indicator/throbber that lets you know it's processing. fast | cat 860 Mbps

Why are you redirecting the output of the script which would otherwise be printed to a program that does nothing but print the output?

Re: Building fast.com

#99

Post by faviouz »

IshKebab wrote: post #73
nippoo wrote: post #60

This is beautiful. By using Netflix's actual CDN and requesting actual video files over HTTP, they're preventing ISPs from whitelisting fast.com without also whitelisting Netflix itself. Of course there'll be a game of cat-and-mouse with DPI, but it's a super-neat way of making it much harder for the ISPs to misrepresent actual video download speed...

Yeah right. Just wait until a user visits fast.com and unthrottle their connection for 20 minutes. I strongly suspect some ISPs already do that with speedtest.net.

I've thought about that as well. Is there any evidence/reports for this?

Re: Building fast.com

#100

Post by thecosas »

figgis wrote: post #91
nkozyra wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note to self: set up cronjob to ping speedtest.net and fast.com every 10 minutes, just in case.

I did that, works great and with speed test cli it (did it without that at first) it's even better! https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli If you are going to setup a cronjob/service for it, I suggest using the --simple flag.

Any before/after stats to show this made a difference in speed?
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