On_fire

While I absolutely agree that more data can make things harder to understand, it's all about how the data is presented. From what I have seen, there already seem to be a lot of people asking why the results are so different from other speed tests that default to multiple connections. And if there are a lot of people asking, there are a lot more who won't bother. I think if both tests are run, and the results are displayed with a simple explanation of what they mean, that will help people understand why their results are so different. It could be as simple as: Single connection: These are the results of doing one thing at a time, such as downloading a file. Ideally they should be fairly close to what you see from multiple connections. [Graph and results] Multiple connections: These are the results of doing many things at the same time, such as loading all of the parts of a web page. If there is a large difference between both results, your connection may not be optimal. Click here for more information. [Graph and results] Easy to understand, if slightly simplistic, it gives a much better picture of the health of a connection then just one or the other testing methodology. And since they are run at very close to the same time, they are more accurate then trying to run both tests separately. Also, Joe Blow that comes here just wanting to see if his ISP is providing what they say they are, isn't going to bother learning the difference between the tests. He is going to go to one of the first links in a search result, and run the first test he finds and if his provider is limiting speeds per connection, he is going to be very confused.

I was just thinking that it would be really cool if the default tests tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded results. I feel like that would make it easy to show in the results when shaping is limiting the speed of individual connections. I know you can already run the tests separately, but a lot of less technical people don't realize that the multi-threaded test is even there, let alone what the test results being different actually means. Also, I feel like this would be helping to explain why a lot of other tests aren't accurate. Just my thoughts.