Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any before/after stats to show this made a difference in speed?
Could you clarify the question?
Do you have any proof that running a cron job impacts internet performance?
Building fast.com
121–130 of 180 posts
Re: Building fast.com
#122I'm getting a consistent difference between fast.com in Safari on iPad vs their Fast app (90-ish vs 65-ish, across 5 interleaved trials). I was hoping for better measurement in the native app, but I suspect it might just be a web view in a native shell. Anyone else seeing similar results?
I think this is an interesting idea, but I'm not convinced it'll actually make a difference. From the consumer side, there's nothing to say that the slowest link isn't Netflix's CDN when a discrepancy occurs between Fast and Speedtest.
I was receiving atrocious download speeds for movies from iTunes (18+ hours for 4 GB), and also saw slow speeds from speakeasy.net/speedtest. The comcast rep just pointed me at Speedtest and said "it's not a problem with your connection, it's fast! Contact Apple." He dismissed the "other" speed testing results. ISPs can continue to throttle directly or by refusing to upgrade peering connections. fast.com providing a number to go along with bad Netflix streaming quality doesn't improve the customer's life.
What I really want is something that empowers me to be heard in my request for the $75 worth of Internet that I pay for every month. I had high hopes that the SamKnows program might yield something, until I received a docsis 3 cable modem in the mail from Comcast with a note: "since you're a participant in SamKnows monitoring, we sent you this upgraded modem so you can take advantage of better speeds". My first thought was "what about all of your customers who aren't participating in SamKnows? When do they receive their 'upgrades'?" Do we really need the government monitoring everyone's broadband performance to ensure that companies are delivering?
Re: Building fast.com
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make sure you update your user agent string to the latest Chrome every couple of weeks too. (I'm assuming any ISP doing this is already doing all kinds of sneaky things).
Since fast.com is https, the headers are encrypted. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless the ISP has the CAs private keys they wouldn't be able to tell your user agent.
The DNS-Query or IP could be used to identify somebody accessing fast.com.
Re: Building fast.com
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since fast.com is https, the headers are encrypted. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless the ISP has the CAs private keys they wouldn't be able to tell your user agent.
The DNS-Query or IP could be used to identify somebody accessing fast.com.
That still doesn't allow the ISP to tell the difference between e.g. wget and a browser via a current User-Agent-String, thanks to HTTPS.
The domain is exposed over various ways, yes, but that's the point of the idea to connect to fast.com regularly to trick theoretical shaping based on it.
Re: Building fast.com
#125Earlier 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.
oh wow thanks for that. That's /much/ better than my DIY solution of using selenium to automate it...
Re: Building fast.com
#126Re: Building fast.com
#127First, I thought why another speed test, then I saw that they link their results directly to speedtest.net (the reference) and finally, I realized that fast.com is so much faster in detecting the download speed (but lacks upload and ping). Not bad. EDIT: And they secured a fantastic domain.
Since they took this precious domain, I was wondering about the purchase price and if it was worth to buy this awesome domain—we are talking here about a mid six digit at least, rather seven digits. Then, I checked how much traffic speedtest.net is getting on SimilarWeb: wow, 150m visits per month, I didn't know that speed testing can be so popular. Conclusion: Yes, it was right to buy this domain and if fast.com get…
They also have slow.com... speedtest.net might be dead.
Re: Building fast.com
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
It shows an animated spinner if you don't redirect the output.
Ah okay awesome! Thanks.
Re: Building fast.com
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We had similar issues when I was at iHeartRadio. We got reports from a number of users that were getting a lot of playback issues. Once we saw that the users were all in a relatively small area in the southeastern US, it took a few days of dealing with local ISPs to sort out the issue: all requests on a certain local ISP were being rewritten and certain headers were getting removed altogether.
Re: Building fast.com
#130Fast.com is a lot slower than both speedtest.net and http://speedtest.dslreports.com/speedtest for me... I get 78mbps on fast.com and 350 on the other two. Not sure what's going on? Maybe they don't have servers near me, I'm in Paris, France.
Notice how speedtest.net selects a server geographically close to you? Well many ISPs work directly with speedtest.net (and other similar services) to ask them to put servers in their own networks, so that traffic avoids going through potentially saturated peering links. So you are really testing the bandwidth of the last mile to your house and the ISP's internal network, which is not representative of your real netw…
That's how it's supposed to be. Speedtest is measuring essentially that you're getting what you paid for. If you have 50/50 Fios, you're paying for a 50mbps connection to the Verizon network.
> So you are really testing the bandwidth of the last mile to your house and the ISP's internal network, which is not representative of your real network bandwidth to the rest of the Internet.
There's no such thing. If you were downloading a file from a friends computer and they have 2mbps upload, your connection speed will be 2mbps. How would your ISP have anything to do with that?
Fast.com just measures your connection to Netflix, which is valuable if that's a service you use a lot.