Super cool that this shows latency under load! It's a shame ISPs seem to only market their throughput numbers, and never mention latency. So many people play multiplayer games now, you would think there would be at least some consumer demand to measure and improve latency over throughput.
Speed Test
151–160 of 216 posts
Re: Speed Test
#152I use fast.com instead. This one tests a 10MB chunk at last and that's the only reliable indication for me. 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping).
> 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping).
That's related to TCP congestion control. TCP starts slow and ramps up speed as download progresses.
But you're right that latency also has an impact on smaller downloads, and that's why latency is a critical measurement of connection quality for everyone, not just gamers.
Re: Speed Test
#153There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data in this elevator right now. EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.
Are you on local 5G? I’ve seen numbers like that. And they often put things in the elevator shafts to prevent dropout.
Might be this building:
https://stelladoradus.com/case-study/mobile-signal-solution-...
Re: Speed Test
#154What are speed tests that work from the command line?
If you have easy access to an arbitrarily large file (or an online random file generator) curl has timing variables that can be exposed via the -w flag.
e.g. Create a format file named curltime.txt containing:
time_namelookup: %{time_namelookup}s\n time_connect: %{time_connect}s\n time_redirect: %{time_redirect}s\n time_starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}s\n ----------\n time_total: %{time_total}s\n
then
curl -svo /dev/null -w "@curltime.txt" https://example.com/my_arbitrary_file
Would result in something like:
time_namelookup: 0.048205s time_connect: 0.079001s time_redirect: 0.000000s time_starttransfer: 0.377603s ---------- time_total: 0.412150s
Re: Speed Test
#155Nice. Every speed test should have a "latency under load" graph, because we can't fight bufferbloat if we can't see it. DSLReports had the first bufferbloat test I'm aware of, but it's broken now. Another example is https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat Ideally this problem should be fixed by ISPs and modem manufacturers, but individuals can use OpenWrt with luci-app-sqm, at least when the connection has a predi…
Cloudflare's speed test doesn't have a graph for latency under load, but it shows those numbers while the test is running.
But you can find those graphs in Cloudflare Radar. Half of the https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality section is based on speed test data.
Re: Speed Test
#156The level of detail is very nice, I wish more tools exposed this as easily. That said, please remember this is a test of you through your ISP to a (hopefully) nearby Cloudflare node. It isn't necessarily testing 'the Internet', since Cloudflare sometimes has creative peering relationships to origins that are not being measured here. Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming…
> Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate. Haven’t downloaded any 150+ GB games (or patches even these days) off of Steam lately I see
Yeah. Comcast is shorting me by a solid 50Mb/s and this is the reason it's annoying. On top of the fact that their garbage excuse for a website is literally completely broken. Every time I've tried to use it for the past year it just sticks me in a login loop. What a truly miserable company.
Re: Speed Test
#157Nice. Every speed test should have a "latency under load" graph, because we can't fight bufferbloat if we can't see it. DSLReports had the first bufferbloat test I'm aware of, but it's broken now. Another example is https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat Ideally this problem should be fixed by ISPs and modem manufacturers, but individuals can use OpenWrt with luci-app-sqm, at least when the connection has a predi…
Cloudflare's speed test doesn't have a graph for latency under load, but it shows those numbers while the test is running. But you can find those graphs in Cloudflare Radar. Half of the https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality section is based on speed test data.
I see a graphical visualization of latency with multiple points and error bars. Maybe "graph" isn't the right technical term?
Edit: It's a box and whisker plot: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/summ...
Re: Speed Test
#158What are speed tests that work from the command line?
If you have easy access to an arbitrarily large file (or an online random file generator) curl has timing variables that can be exposed via the -w flag. e.g. Create a format file named curltime.txt containing: time_namelookup: %{time_namelookup}s\n time_connect: %{time_connect}s\n time_redirect: %{time_redirect}s\n time_starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}s\n ----------\n time_total: %{time_total}s\n then curl -svo /…
That doesn't provide any information about jitter, latency, packet loss, DNS, location, etc.
Re: Speed Test
#159Re: Speed Test
#160I recently discovered the networkquality tool on Mac. As far as I can tell it's the only tool that measures simultaneous upload and download speeds which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases. I was using it to see if my new hardcore gaming router gave me better range than the old one. On isolated up and down tests, it did. But on combined tests, the advantage especially for upload disappeared…
> which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases
What's more reflective of real world use cases is a hot discussion topic. :)
The "networkQuality" tool on macOS and other implementations(1) of the "RPM" algorithm(2) are very good to see how an Internet connection behaves under high stress. But the real world is seldom high stress (100Mbps+ connections are rarely pushed to the limit, honestly).
In your example, video conferencing indeed does simulataneous upload and download, but it's also low bandwidth (relatively speaking) and doesn't usually come close to saturating a connection. It can impacted by other traffic in the same connection though.
Which can come from a single user, or multiple users sharing the same connection. And neither networkQuality nor Cloudflare's speed test measure how a connection behaves with multiple users stressing a connection.
In the end, which tool you use depends on what you're trying to measure. For me, the Cloudflare speed test is closer to measuring what I experience in real world use.
(1) https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness
(2) https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiv...