You mentioned Stalled Tabs. I am wondering if you have so many tabs opened the Network detected it as some malicious traffic and starting slowing you down.
Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
291–300 of 356 posts
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#292Yes, 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
Yes, they could just check if fast.com was resolved recently.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#293Earlier 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
Very different IPs for me.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they can observe my queries to authoritative servers. But I didn't claim that running your own recursive DNS guaranteed privacy; I only claimed that it dispelled all problems arising from relying on someone else's DNS recursors. I happen to trust my ISP, BTW; I really just like running my own because I can observe what it's doing.
> I happen to trust my ISP, BTW Unless you can prove otherwise you should assume they're selling you out.
I can't "prove" it. But my ISP is a nerd ISP; it's Andrews & Arnold, a rather unusual outfit. If they were caught selling us out, they'd lose all their customers in a flash.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 everywhe…
For what it's worth, a popular speed test site could gain kickbacks from ISPs who want their customers to see "correct" number.
However, the deal is mostly not about speed test sites but about ISP behavior. ISP may maintain a registry of known speed test sites and shape traffic so that you get great results on those.
Registries aside, your ISP may also be detecting and throttling BT and/or VPN traffic, shaping sustained traffic, etc., meaning you will tend to get good speed test scores but get slow speeds if you attempt to use your connection in a real-life scenario.
And back to speed tests, they do tend to prefer servers located very favourably for ISP but not for you, routing to server on same ISP's network in the same city by default (this may be overridable by a tech-savvy user). I would assume they have agreements with ISPs on hosting and maintaining those servers, making any sort of manipulation a no-brainer for the ISP.
All in all, I routinely get cases where a speed test reports great results but due to whatever reason I get really slow effective speeds.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#296Yes, 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
I usually use the DSL Reports test [0], downstream is similar (CF: 193, DSL: 205; I pay for 200, but speeds do vary from slightly more to slightly less over the day), but the upstream for CF is plain wrong, it gives 25 Mbit vs. the correct 50 (both what I pay for and reach normally) for DSL Reports
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I nearly did this, but because I was having connection issues. I got it to post to Slack every 15 mins and to post to an alert channel if speed was less than a certain value (something like 3Mbps, crazy low). I would log the fault from work and it would be fixed by the time I got home. However I have fibre now, and it’s glorious. No crap scripts required (though it still runs!).
Sounds like the speed tests are filling your buffers, allowing your router to do proper QOS and prioritize your packets correctly. Do you have QOS turned on? You might want to turn it off since it sounds misconfigured. You can check here: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
Oh it’s great now. The fibre is fantastic.
The old copper required some ISP work which required a person to go up the pole at least once a month and often once a week. It was absolutely terrible. The guy who came told me there was water in the cable, but the details of what that means are beyond my understanding.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strangely, fast.com still reports faster connection speeds than my broadband is supposed to offer. No, my broadband is not faster than what I'm paying for, I can see that when monitoring actual transfers(including the transfers when doing the tests). They do offer about %95 of the promised speed, not %110 that fast.com or speedtest.net measures.
In New Zealand it is somewhat well known that our local fibre providers actually provisions each connection for slightly more than the agreed speed. E.g. 100mbits is usually provisioned at around 110mbits. So our speed tests are usually just over 100mbits (due to TCP etc overheads taking some of the overprovisoned parts). Wonder if that is what is happening to you.
This seems to fall off at gigabit, but I’d love to test with 2, 4 or 8gbps which Orcon (and maybe others) are offering.
My ONT only supports gigabit out, so I can’t test faster options. That said, fast.com has told me I’m getting 1.2gbps recently…
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#299Lots of people here have already mentioned the Netflix fast.com test, which is indeed good. But also worthy of recommendation IHMO is the Cloudflare one (speed.cloudflare.com). Main reason I say that is its one of the few that measures jitter (or at least openly exposes the measurement).
There is also a test based on free software: https://librespeed.org/.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#300Earlier 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.
I do though -- it costs money to produce electricity. So if more electricity is used overall my costs ultimately go up to accommodate. Perhaps fuel prices increase, or to offset the cost of additional power plants to support the higher demand, or any number of other reasons. Paying by your usage does offset this but it doesn't help if the total amount of demand increases.
It also costs more money to support higher bandwidth of network travel. But unlike with electricity, there is no cost (to network providers) to generate the data, since the data is usually paid for by the source. This means the average consumer doesn't get any of the benefit of the increased pricing -- it has not changed how the internet providers charge to consumers at all, only how they charge content makers. And customers who like the content get increased costs on top of that.
Therefore, I don't see any benefit by removing net neutrality -- it can only hurt consumers. If it only benefits network providers, why should I support it?