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Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

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

#32

Post by CraigJPerry »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #20

I was on the phone with a buddy trying to troubleshoot Local file transfer speeds vs Speedtest results. Speedtest kept reporting 100Mb/s range speeds (the tier he was paying for). Local file transfers however were stuck in the 1MB/s range. After some questions and troubleshooting he discovered that he had used a 10Mb/s hub instead of a 1Gb/s switch that was sitting right next to it. A simple mixup. His internet conne…

Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when connected to an in-country vpn endpoint.

Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?

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

#34

Post by manicpolymath »

CursedUrn wrote: post #8
btown wrote: post #7

Impossible to know for sure, but the ROI on “accelerate packets that match an IP whitelist that is drawn nightly from the DNS records for well-traveled speed test sites” must be quite high.

Could speed test sites do something about this? Like obfuscate the traffic somehow to get more genuine results?

I think the bigger problem isn’t so much the traffic type as it is traffic destination. As long as there are only a few hosts or domains providing speed test services (and there always will be: upload speeds are expensive) ISPs will be able to whack-a-mole with their whitelists.

I’d say that this needs some sort of regulation, but as long as ISPs are the gatekeepers, they can cheese $Government all day long too. This word gets overused perhaps, but the closest I can come up with is a decentralized monitoring setup with random speed test hosts (especially hosted @home style). Care would have to be taken to avoid how-are-these-still-legal data caps though.

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

#35

Post by jamesmunns »

tentacleuno wrote: post #29
vyrotek wrote: post #10

This 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.

Is that with dd-wrt or something similar? I heavily doubt you'd get that feature on an ISP router :-)

Unifi routers do this, for sure.

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

#36

Post by traceroute66 »

Lots 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).

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

#37

Post by formerly_proven »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #32
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #20

I was on the phone with a buddy trying to troubleshoot Local file transfer speeds vs Speedtest results. Speedtest kept reporting 100Mb/s range speeds (the tier he was paying for). Local file transfers however were stuck in the 1MB/s range. After some questions and troubleshooting he discovered that he had used a 10Mb/s hub instead of a 1Gb/s switch that was sitting right next to it. A simple mixup. His internet conne…

Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when connected to an in-country vpn endpoint. Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?

> I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?

Better routes. Most latency on the internet is not due to c.

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

#38

Post by jshier »

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.

Or just running iperf on a personal server. I use that to diagnose differences between raw UDP / TCP throughput and HTTP.
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