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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?

#21

Post by femto113 »

brahma-dev wrote: post #12

Not very scientific but you can try something that is unlikely to be whitelisted. Eg. http://134.209.196.181:8080 This is an instance of https://github.com/e7d/speedtest running on Digital Ocean in Amsterdam.

Interesting. Using Wave broadband in Seattle from this server I get

    38.69 Mbps Download
   154.43 Mbps Upload
While from speedtest.net (to a local server) I get

   178.34 Mbps Download
   192.23 Mbps Upload
I'd chalk it up to distance/noise except that the download speeds are way more similar than the upload speeds.

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

#24

Post by cj »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #20

I 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…

Edit: removed due to downvoting. Original comment pointed out that transfer speed is normally measured in Mbps not MB/s.

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

#25

Post by Klathmon »

CursedUrn wrote: post #8
btown wrote: post #7

Impossible to know for sure, but the ROI on “accelerate packets that match an IP whitelist that is drawn nightly from the DNS records for well-traveled speed test sites” must be quite high.

Could speed test sites do something about this? Like obfuscate the traffic somehow to get more genuine results?

I believe this is the idea behind the https://fast.com speed test.

It just downloads data from Netflix servers, so the results you get are basically guaranteed to be the speeds you would get with Netflix.

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

#27

Post by raggi »

Study the traffic in Wireshark, and also sniff upstream of your router to compare. I'd bet it's your router before I'd bet it's your isp.

I gave up with cots routers a while back, and life has been significantly improved. I wrote it up here https://res.rag.pub/2020-11-1-an-home-router.html

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

#28

Post by djbusby »

cj wrote: post #24
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #20

I 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…

Edit: removed due to downvoting. Original comment pointed out that transfer speed is normally measured in Mbps not MB/s.

Can't get 100 Megabits on a 10 Megabit line was the point.

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

#29

Post by tentacleuno »

vyrotek wrote: post #10

This is one feature I like from my Wifi router. It does regular speed tests and tracks the results over time. I like to think it reminds my ISP that I want the speed I'm paying for.

Is that with dd-wrt or something similar? I heavily doubt you'd get that feature on an ISP router :-)

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

#30

Post by vitus »

CursedUrn wrote: post #8
btown wrote: post #7

Impossible to know for sure, but the ROI on “accelerate packets that match an IP whitelist that is drawn nightly from the DNS records for well-traveled speed test sites” must be quite high.

Could speed test sites do something about this? Like obfuscate the traffic somehow to get more genuine results?

This is one of the biggest selling points of fast.com -- it's served from the same Netflix domain + servers that also stream video (nflxvideo.net).

If ISPs want to make fast.com fast, then they need to do so for all of Netflix.

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