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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?

#261

Post by majewsky »

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…

> 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.

About seven years ago, when unencrypted HTTP was still commonplace, I observed exactly this behavior (subscriber-wide QoS based on speedtest sensing) with my residential cable internet. My connection was nominally 100 Mib/s, but I would often observe downloads e.g. in Steam running at only 10-20 Mib/s. In those cases, I would open up a terminal and run

  while sleep 1; do curl http:///speedtest; done
Didn't matter that this URL would give 404. Just because the URL contained "speedtest", the ISP machinery would adjust the QoS and the Steam download would immediately shoot up from 10 Mib/s to nearly the full 100 Mib/s.

By now, this has not worked in a long time. I'm guessing they tore down the respective machinery once the important speedtest websites moved to HTTPS.

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

#262

Post by bloodguard »

Whenever my comcast link gets slow I go to their speed test page and it always tries to tell me I'm getting more than what I'm paying for. Shortly after running the test everything starts to speed up again.

Makes me wonder if they have some kind of shady "squeaky wheel" QOS traffic shaping voodoo.

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

#263

Post by dtaht »

parasubvert wrote: post #195
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would t…

> "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. Which is utter nonsense for any large service provider that requires traffic engineering to handle elephant flows. This is the problem with blanket slogans, they constrain the network in ways that impact user experience dramatically, and is why a LOT of internet pioneers oppose net neutrality. Encouraging open…

I have long worried that net neutrality rules mis-applied would prevent the default availability of quality fair queuing and AQM solutions along the edge of the network.

https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/net_neutrality_customers/

https://blog.apnic.net/2020/01/22/bufferbloat-may-be-solved-...

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

#264

Post by hnick »

dunco wrote: post #237
hnick wrote: post #228

My ISP's support told me to always use their local copy ( https://speed.aussiebroadband.com.au/ ) as it avoids routing issues downstream but more importantly, it logs the history onto my account for them to view. The numbers are often higher than what I pay for, but I think they are honest. When I was having connection issues (dialup-tier download speeds, 20 megabit upload) it was reflected accurately. Since I trust…

I was a TPG refugee who switched to Aussie. TPG had the same setup and it always showed me that I was getting the full speed I payed for, but whenever my traffic went overseas, measured some other way, it would be shockingly slow (like sub 2mbps and with a noticeably bad experience) Every call to TPG was painful and they would just refer me back to their own speedtest.net site and tell me nothing was wrong. switched…

Their support is local and easy to talk to. Easy to go off script with them, and it makes a huge difference in my experience when calling. Unfortunately I've had to call them many times, but that's the reality of HFC NBN I guess - there's nothing they could have done for me apart from build a trail of evidence so NBN actually does something about it. We swapped the NTD and so far so good, I think it was just dying.

Aussie is a bit expensive though. It wasn't so bad early on but there are some decent looking competitors now.

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

#265

Post by BenjiWiebe »

zw123456 wrote: post #235
throwaway290 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, expected better from this community. I assumed it is common knowledge that most ISPs run traffic shapers and whatnot that take into account what you are connecting to, what sort of data you send, how intensively are you using your connection over whatever time window, etc. And IMO secure DNS is not a solution. Either this ISP behavior is made illegal, or it will remain an arms race (with ISP being clear winner…

Agree. It's funny how people I know who are "non-tech" intuitively understand that of course speed-tests are rigged, but tech people somehow think that the same place that allows Facebook pages that say that the jews have space lasers, that same place somehow is completely honest about speed tests. I am just pointing out, fake world is fake world. Just because it's says Mbps does not exempt it from fakeness. Fake is…

Well I'm a techie, for sure when it comes to networking, and on neither our current ISP nor our previous ISP did speedtests ever report a different value than what file transfers/bandwidth monitoring showed.

For that matter, I've never been able to find (and I've checked) that any particular site or connection type was actually given priority and more bandwidth. When the connection is slow, it's equally slow everywhere. When fast, equally fast everywhere.

Also I get the feeling that some people think the speedtest sites themselves are giving fake numbers. Why? What would they gain from that? And why have I never ran across this, despite using many speedtest sites on multiple ISPs?

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

#266

Post by judge2020 »

eli wrote: post #225
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...

Google does the same if you search “speed test” they have one that runs through the search results page. Cloudflare runs one too. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ Those are all harder to game than speedtest.net

Cloudflare could easily be gamed if they did some passive SNI for that hostname and boosted internet speeds for 15 seconds. But maybe they'll make it a cdn-cgi endpoint+randomize the endpoint to random customers' sites at some point in the future if they discover ISPs doing this.

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

#267

Post by vachina »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #245
eli wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does the same if you search “speed test” they have one that runs through the search results page. Cloudflare runs one too. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ Those are all harder to game than speedtest.net

The cloudflare one is the most accurate I've ever found. People often accuse it of "reading low" but after much experimentation I think it actually reads accurately and most of the others read fast. So much of the web is behind cloudflare that most ISPs are unwilling to prioritize traffic to it. It also loads a selection of dummy files of varying sizes which is a more realistic portrayal of normal internet usage than…

I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible.

Monitoring the NIC rx is the most accurate in my experience.

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

#268

Post by LeoPanthera »

vachina wrote: post #267
LeoPanthera wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloudflare one is the most accurate I've ever found. People often accuse it of "reading low" but after much experimentation I think it actually reads accurately and most of the others read fast. So much of the web is behind cloudflare that most ISPs are unwilling to prioritize traffic to it. It also loads a selection of dummy files of varying sizes which is a more realistic portrayal of normal internet usage than…

I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Monitoring the NIC rx is the most accurate in my experience.

> I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible.

Perhaps there is a confusion between megabytes, and megabits.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #32
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…

Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when connected to an in-country vpn endpoint. Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by zinekeller »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #268
vachina wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Monitoring the NIC rx is the most accurate in my experience.

> I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Perhaps there is a confusion between megabytes, and megabits.

Unfortunately, no. I intentionally constrained an ethernet link at 10Mb (in the PHY layer, so any bugs in the network stack is irrelevant) and both Fast.com and Cloudflare misread the upload speeds up to 20 times (what should be 9.something Mbps became >200Mbps). Speedtest.net is immune to this, even using their browse client. I don't know what's causing this, but I've ruled out browser bugs. I haven't tested Google's though.
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