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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?

#91

Post by WarChortle18 »

WanderPanda wrote: post #67
bzxcvbn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.

*should be an option that you can book at your ISP.

Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would that work?

This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition.

So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.

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

#92

Post by iancarroll »

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…

> 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

Unless something has changed recently, the Speedtest site just acts as an intermediary between you and one of the "volunteer" servers that actually perform the test for the client. Since these are hosted on many networks, it's conceivable that this is the easiest way to QoS the speed tests.

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

#93

Post by tommiegannert »

I don't trust speedtests. There are all kinds of wrong incentives, similar to GPU benchmarks. One thing I noticed was that the data speedtest.net sends has really low entropy. It just repeats 10 bytes. If I ran an ISP I would...

So I wrote chargen2p [1] as an extension to the classical chargen protocol.

I use it together with a Prometheus exporter [2] I wrote to periodically check my laptop's connectivity. The actual check runs over Wireguard, since I didn't want to open my chargen2p server to the public. This only checks download speeds, mind you. (The chargen2p library exports upload metrics, but the exporter doesn't use it.)

My graphs tell me the average is ~5 MBps, so 40 Mbps. This is between me (Switzerland) and a Hetzner DC in Germany. speedtest.net just now claimed 160 Mbps.

[1] https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p

[2] https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter

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

#94

Post by mlyle »

mmastrac wrote: post #88
mlyle wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not trust them for accurate results. Ookla speedtest properly transfers data and divides to find throughput-- both with the website, the GUI app, and their CLI program. The open source speedtest-cli that uses their infrastructure is hampered by only one connection and can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. Fast.com is ... a little optimistic about transients getting transfers started and sometimes report…

I'm seeing gigabit(-ish) via speedtest-cli: Speedtest by Ookla Server: TELUS Mobility - Calgary, AB (id = 17555) ISP: TELUS Latency: 0.50 ms (0.12 ms jitter) Download: 938.58 Mbps (data used: 422.8 MB) Upload: 919.90 Mbps (data used: 959.8 MB) Packet Loss: Not available. FTTH, Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch -> UniFi Dream Machine Pro SE via 10G link -> Nokia ONT. I _do_ get limited to around 300mbps if my Mikrotik is in the mix…

> I'm seeing gigabit(-ish) via speedtest-cli:

You're using their cli client, not the open source one. Below, first their "speedtest" and then the open source "speedtest-cli"

    mlyle@brazen:~ $ ./speedtest 
    
       Speedtest by Ookla
    
         Server: Cloudflare - San Jose, CA (id = 44932)
            ISP: Frontier Communications
        Latency:    12.10 ms   (1.29 ms jitter)
       Download:   953.32 Mbps (data used: 1.0 GB )                               
         Upload:   891.89 Mbps (data used: 1.1 GB )                               
    Packet Loss: Not available.
vs.

    mlyle@brazen:~ $ speedtest-cli
    Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
    Testing from Frontier Communications (47.155.215.132)...
    Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
    Selecting best server based on ping...
    Hosted by Nitel (Los Angeles, CA) [446.50 km]: 49.103 ms
    Testing download speed................................................................................
    Download: 323.09 Mbit/s
    Upload: 300.49 Mbit/s
speedtest-cli is a python program, vs. the native speedtest:

    mlyle@brazen:~ $ file /home/mlyle/.local/bin/speedtest-cli
    /home/mlyle/.local/bin/speedtest-cli: Python script, ASCII text executable
    mlyle@brazen:~ $ file speedtest
    speedtest: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped

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

#95

Post by cstrahan »

ChaosMarine wrote: post #39
xioren00 wrote: post #11

This is real. I have had it confirmed to me by a Comcast employee. And really, this shouldn't surprise anyone.

Just because they can do it should not be a reason for doing it. You're broken in, defatist or conformist.

Not being surprised is not the same as being defeatist/conformist. There are things I would love to see changed that don’t surprise me, and there are things that surprise me that I see no reason to change. One does not imply the other.

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

#96

Post by mlyle »

_jsnk wrote: post #87
mlyle wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not trust them for accurate results. Ookla speedtest properly transfers data and divides to find throughput-- both with the website, the GUI app, and their CLI program. The open source speedtest-cli that uses their infrastructure is hampered by only one connection and can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. Fast.com is ... a little optimistic about transients getting transfers started and sometimes report…

> speedtest-cli ... can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. I routinely get 700-900Mbps reported using speedtest-cli from centurylink fiber. My bottleneck is the CPU on my router running openwrt.

Can you look at this, and tell me which of the 2 you're using:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31063868

From speedtest's official cli program, on my 2.5gbase-t connected machine I get 2200mbps up and down.. but from the open source speedtest-cli I get 300-350mbps.

(Here, I only got ~900mbps because I was running from a raspberry pi with a 1000BaseT link).

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

#97

Post by tomschwiha »

pojzon wrote: post #19

I was cursing on my ISP for a long time till I understood that Im on a 100Mbit wifi. Then added a wire connection to my server and instantly 10x the speed :^] Dont be like me, have wires set up everywhere where needed.

Reminds me of buying a 144Hz monitor but not enabling 144Hz-mode..

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

#98

Post by denton-scratch »

stepanhruda wrote: post #85
aaomidi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing, as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve fast.com and netflix.com

"Need" is too strong. Without going into the arguments against DoH, we don't "need" it, because there is an alternative: run your own recursive DNS. That should be something that a consumer could switch on or off. A default install of Unbound, for example, seems to /just work/.

Downside: if you have any kind of home network, running your own recursive DNS probably implies running your own DHCP, which isn't normally a consumer alternative (you could do it using settings on a domestic router, but not if it's crippled or locked-down). Also, DNS caching shouldn't be so effective (but I haven't noticed that effect).

Upside: all kinds of problems resulting from relying on DNS servers controlled by others disappear. You're not relying on them any more.

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

#99

Post by hkt »

Try with LibreSpeed?

Hosted version: https://librespeed.org/

Self hosted version: https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest

For those who need to document lower speeds than SLAs from their ISPs, this will help you check for chicanery, shenanigans, and sneaky QoS. Recommend.

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

#100

Post by edgyquant »

When I lived in the Midwest I had frontier and when I’d complain about speeds they’d send me to their speed test that always reflected my exact data speed (even though the actual internet speeds were 10x slower some times.) Fast.com always had more accurate speeds.
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