That’s true. Whenever the internet seems too sluggish, I run fast.com and other internet speed test tool then everything seems significantly faster.
Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
281–290 of 356 posts
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#282No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#283That’s true. Whenever the internet seems too sluggish, I run fast.com and other internet speed test tool then everything seems significantly faster.
Windows does the same thing: the moment you open the Task Manager, the top three items magically throttle themselves.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#284So some ISPs are rigging the results like some car manufacturers were cheating on diesel eco tests?
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I believe this is the idea behind the https://fast.com speed test.
Or maybe the idea was that Netflix would get the speedtest treatment.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.
You pay electricity by usage. We don't have "unlimited" electricity plans. This is why you do not subsidize Bitcoin miners.
That's not the full picture.
Electricity prices are dominated by supply vs. demand. There are many sources of electricity available, some of them being very cheap (hydro) some of them expensive (currently gas).
When demand for electricity goes up, the cheap power sources are going to be running at capacity, and utilities will need to buy more expensive power. This increases the marginal cost of electricity for everyone.
So just because Bitcoin miners pay for electricity, doesn't mean we aren't subsidising them. We are subsidising them by paying more for imported power even though our needs could easily be covered by cheap, local power sources.
The way to fix this would be to charge progressive prices depending on usage, ie. every person gets to use 1000kWh at the cheap local hydro power price, then the price increases gradually, and any electricity usage beyond 10000kWh/person/year you need to pay the full market price of electricity.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Add a https://fast.com/pixel.png"/ >on netflix.com 2. ??? 3. profit
If you're a web developer, you owe it to your users to add this to your site even if you have no connection with Netflix or Fast.com. Randomize the image name every time to avoid caching - it doesn't matter if the image isn't found.
Do you want tracking? Because that's how you get tracking
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'…
If you're using a VPN, I've noticed that behavior when the VPN was compressing data in the background, since Speedtest data compressed well.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#289Yes, 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...
Can't ISP just prioritize just fast.com based on its url? Or fast.com and netflix share the same IP
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#290Alongside probably whitelisting :
Most speed test sites hit the ISP cache or peered traffic and hence are much faster.
you can inspect fast.com and see this in action: It will show up something like "ipv4-c209-sea001-ix.1.oca.nflxvideo.net" Which is their openconnect [1] location in Seattle IX.
In many cases you will probably see a prefix indicating your ISP - Most ISPs with some scale host their own caches or peer with an internet exchange directly.
Incase of speedtest - its the same story most ISPs host servers locally and speedtest's website generally tests from it
Most of my ISP screw ups are involve content which isnt cached and its difficult to convey that when your netflix is able to stream 4K content easily but struggling to download a 100mb file of some AWS region :/
I sometimes use proof.ovh.net and ping.online.net to test using iperf also ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com helps debug if ISP is having issues with connecting to AWS (more open than not thats the case with mine)
--- [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com