This is real. I have had it confirmed to me by a Comcast employee. And really, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
How frequently do you need to ping speedtest to be prioritized?
Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
151–160 of 356 posts
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#152Speed tests often test last mile. That’s only part of real world performance. Some examples of other factors to real world stuff:
1. If you internet provider has limited bandwidth when it connects to other parts of the internet. I used to have a problem where my ISP has one connection out of its network. That bandwidth was limited and caused real world issues.
2. TCP can and often does involve multiple round trips. As web pages have grown in size it’s had an impact on performance at the network level
Increased bandwidth in the last mile doesn’t solve for these types of issues
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping? Better routes. Most latency on the internet is not due to c.
Classic story where this is related: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html tl;dr timeout was sufficiently low and user sufficiently skilled to work out his emails could be delivered only within 500 miles
My favourite aspect of this story is how the academics, being academics, took it upon themselves to characterise the problem in detail before telling the postmaster about it. Could just as easily have said "huh, that's weird" and thrown it at them on day one.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#154I have noticed that speed test seems to run fast when everything else is slow. I haven't seen anything else speed up though. I guess they prioritise traffic to speed test, but unfortunately that doesn't get me a speed up in general.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#155Earlier 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.
Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?
Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is building in Nevada.
You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Pi is definitely limited in terms of CPU. This is a fairly old, but beefy Xeon chip on my unraid box. Might be native vs Python code on ARM?
Yup, native vs. Python would explain a lot on the Pi, but I've also seen this on my big Threadripper machine here and on my Hetzner server in Virginia. I'd assumed it was just something intrinsic. On the other hand: speedtest's own thing uses multiple parallel connections. So if you have low amounts of loss that prevent one TCP connection from going super fast, it'll do better on speedtest than speedtest-cli. Thanks…
> edit: Just noticed that the Hetzner server in VA geolocates wrong and chooses servers in Kansas.
This is a common failure mode of geolocation, especially as it pertains to cloud providers. The databases can guess which country the IP address corresponds to, but not anything more (and as such, they default to something in the middle of the country).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_center_of_the_Unite...
Geolocation data tends to be worse for cloud providers for whatever reason (I believe it's a combination of differing Internet footprint characteristics, as well as IP aggregation mismatch on behalf of the geolocation database).
(Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island for another common geolocation placeholder)
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
What if I want privacy on a non-home network? Huge part of my traffic is over 5G/LTE.
VPN if that isn't blocked or throttled by your carrier?
Though you need a trusted host to act as the other end, or you are just swapping one monitored link with another, and finding that could be a task in its own right depending on your threat model / paranoia level.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#158This is one feature I like from my Wifi router. It does regular speed tests and tracks the results over time. I like to think it reminds my ISP that I want the speed I'm paying for.
if this is theoretically saturating your bandwidth doesn't this lead to intermittent poor performance from your connected devices?
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber…
>> If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I
Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#160Yes, 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...
I’m now imagining a consortium of software companies that all put most of their service requests behind a shared speed-test domain, to do the same thing as a common good
Maybe this could even be a standalone service