Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 356 posts

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

#301

Post by KennyBlanken »

zinekeller wrote: post #270
LeoPanthera wrote: post #268

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. 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'…

Which is more likely: that these tools are all broken, or you didn't actually set the ethernet link speed successfully?

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

#302

Post by zinekeller »

exikyut wrote: post #276
zinekeller wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

You mean you told the PHY to renegotiate at 10M with something like `ethtool -s speed 10`? While stumbling around attempting to figure out `tc qdisc` a while back I found that the shaping it was applying was very synthetic, such that asking for low bitrate and high latency would mean the kernel would just wait a second or two then shunt several KB of data through at once. IIRC I was just playing with the default appr…

Ah, apologies for not responding here. It's (shocks in disgust) a Realtek one, I forgot which specifically, but the "smart" switch (ugh, I hate the naming everything smart) definitely said that it's only a 10M Ethernet connection.

Using Chrome's limiter, capped at 5,000,000 bits/sec (5Mbps) both direction: Speedtest.net: 5.00Mbps in both directions (nice, are they're including overhead in these calculations?) Cloudflare: 4.80Mbps downlink, 4.81Mbps uplink (well, it's true now) Fast.com: 5.0Mbps downlink, 58Mbps uplink (holy crap, that's not what I've expected)

So I will re-test Cloudflare again at link-limited PHY, but Fast.com's test seems a little weird.

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

#303

Post by zinekeller »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #301
zinekeller wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Which is more likely: that these tools are all broken, or you didn't actually set the ethernet link speed successfully?

It's (shocks in disgust) a Realtek one, I forgot which specifically, but the "smart" switch (ugh, I hate the naming everything smart) definitely said that it's only a 10M Ethernet connection. So definitely double-checked that.

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

#304

Post by rbanffy »

elcomet wrote: post #165
beowulfey wrote: post #122

Earlier 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.

With electricity you don’t care where your energy is coming from. It’s not like “Oh! I only charge my laptop with nuclear energy because it runs better”.

With internet, where the data comes from and goes to is the whole point.

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

#305

Post by eptcyka »

wheels wrote: post #288
zinekeller wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What VPNs do compression? And don't speed tests normally use TLS?

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

#306

Post by renonce »

Top Chinese university here. In China we had to use proxies to access certain foreign sites, such as Google and Hacker News, because of censorship. Proxies were slow but speedtest was fast, so one of the guys tried including "speedtest" as a fake hostname for the proxies. Speed was immediately up to 1Gbps rather than 10Mbps.

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

#307

Post by zahma »

300mbit symmetrical fiber connection here. Even with a VPN (WireGuard), I can nearly saturate the downlink and uplink with a Speedtest and ~5ms latency. I get similar performance via sftp download from a server located several countries away. Upload speed is not nearly as good, but I can’t say if that’s due to my ISP or the server on the other end.

I’ve also seen a lot of Speedtest results for ATT fiber. These allow full gigabit transfers. I do wonder if these results hold up to actual use cases if someone can saturate 1gbit.

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

#308

Post by andycjw »

this is true, in my country, it's a well known thing that the internet gets un-throttled when accessing speedtest, and someone ingenious made a script to keep running speedtest-cli in background to keep the internet working at full speed

https://github.com/orz811017/boost_bandwidth_via_speedtest

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

#309

Post by belter »

kristopolous wrote: post #257
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.

I'm in Los Angeles. My downstream is half using this tool compared to the one built into Google. That's reasonable, actually pretty impressive for talking to Amsterdam It's hard to really comprehend how amazing it is that I can talk to Europe at 200M/s over WiFi from my personal apartment on my smartphone while lying in bed in Los Angeles, and pay a flat rate that works out to about $2.25/day for the privilege. It's…

Amsterdam is a kind of special case as its where major internet providers peer with each other via the AMS-IX

https://www.ams-ix.net/ams

You should try if possible connections to other pages in other countries.

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

#310

Post by vmurthy »

For the curious, macOS Monterey includes a cool tool called `networkQuality` that does what you want. It checks the upload/download speed and more. Check out this[0] article or `man networkQuality` from your terminal

[0]https://www.macobserver.com/tips/macos-monterey-includes-net...

Post reply on HN