sourcejedi

A little bird told me testmy.net has been revised :-). Same great taste, but still no bufferbloat test. Search didn't find an entry in this forum, so here's your feature request :-). High download & upload speeds are nice. But particularly on slow connections, it's very easy to have your connection degrade horribly when you have something uploading. BitTorrent was the historical example, but other examples might be DropBox sync, or uploading photos to Facebook. If your modem buffers are bloated, latency during uploads can increase e.g. from 0.05 seconds to 1 second. That's a factor of 20, e.g. it can cause web pages to take much much longer to load. Feature request: detect if there is a large increase in latency during the upload or download test. Thanks Alan

Ow! Sorry I missed that part on first reading . AIUI that's less common. Maybe benefits from the speed by making it harder to max out for long times, but annoying all the same.

I'm very happy to beta something in this area. I could go on about it for ages! though am not sure what else to usefully say at this point. I sympathize with the problem of interpreting latency. Bufferbloat is distinctly detectable, painful, and common enough it should be part of any speed test. Sample the latency a few times before and during a download, check for an excessive difference. 100ms is the maximum the buffer "should" be set to; beyond that it starts to be a problem. The pain means it's a good reason to consider changing connection... The most simple, reliable fix is to use a higher speed connection. OpenWRT is an awesome fix if you want to set up a router all of your own... the fun starts with choosing a router that's supported and yet still for sale. I guess other issues with latency or loss are hard for a convenient web test. I would have enjoyed seeing idle latency during all my "auto" tests. Whether it would have tell me anything useful is another matter. A 100ms spike on the connection is a slight surprise and not entirely welcome . I assume this wasn't during a download test. I know downloads caused an average around 100ms, which is understandable.

I love testmy.net . I'm curious if you're aware of the "ping under load" issue, as shown in the dlsreports.com speedtest results? A.k.a. bufferbloat. There's a lot of old DSL connections set up with excessive buffers. When you're actually using the connection, ping goes from reasonable to several hundred ms, and it just sucks to use. I've seen both >1000ms during uploads and >1000ms during downloads. And that's cumulative (i.e. if you do both at once). Faster connections tend not to have a problem, but there's still plenty of bad connections around. E.g. see /speedtest/results/bufferbloat on the same site.