Ppcc

i forgot when i found TestMyNet, probably before 2011? anyways i went looking for other speedtesting websites exactly because i heard ISPs around the world and in my country(singapore) are literally bribing Speedtest dot net to give their consumers/clients faked results.

the only other consisent way i could to check my IRL download speed was to torrent large files, then check the avg download speeds, but that way is impossible to pinpoint slowdowns due to country-to-country throttling(which supposedly my ISP is also hiding /covering up), torrent sources come from all over the world(mostly USA it seems).

i forgot when i found TestMyNet, probably before 2011? anyways i went looking for other speedtesting websites exactly because i heard ISPs around the world and in my country(singapore) are literally bribing Speedtest dot net to give their consumers/clients faked results.

the only other consisent way i could to check my IRL download speed was to torrent large files, then check the avg download speeds, but that way is impossible to pinpoint slowdowns due to country-to-country throttling(which supposedly my ISP is also hiding /covering up), torrent sources come from all over the world(mostly USA it seems).

Well said.
 
TestMy.net started in 2001... but my first internet speed test became popular in 1996, on accident.  Was pretty crazy trying to run it early on, not knowing anything.  No real tools to even learn online yet either.
 
I hope one day more people find TestMy.net again.  I'll just keep building.

Over the decades I've always strived to have the fastest servers I can afford to host TestMy.net.  My journey with hosting has taken me into a colocated datacenter where I pay for cabinet space, power & internet connection and bring in my own equipment.
 
When I first started using colo I built everything out with brand new, current generation servers and networking gear.  Over the years I added servers and built up a High Availability Proxmox cluster.  Adding servers I found that eBay was definitely my friend.  Now I could afford servers that only a few years earlier often went for nearly 10X what I was able to get them for "off lease".  Each time I added a new server, it was more powerful than the previous.
 
Over this time I'm adding more resources, things are getting faster.  Even my first servers were full solid state, employing arrays of 4 Samsung 850 Pro SSDs.  But things really started flying with the advent of Optane storage.  A game changer... really, it was too good. (and now it's gone.)
 
Fast forward to 2024.  I get a generous donation of servers, the person doesn't care what I do with them, they're just happy to give them to me.  They're newer than my servers, 2nd version into the next generation of CPU.  So quite a bit newer.  I get one of them setup with the same Optane storage I run in my current master server and start benchmarking. 
 
It's not really faster and doesn't justify switching servers.  Sometimes it was slower.  I assume because my servers are higher clock speed, highest end of the CPU SKU.  Scratching my head, I really thought being so much newer I'd get a much better result.
 
I take the storage out and pop it in a gaming rig... another machine recently donated to me by a friend.  This PC happens to have hardware from the same year as the server I just tested.  I run the same tests and had to do a double take.  Not only was it faster on the gaming rig, it was WAY faster.  This made me reimagine my server topology.  Maybe it was time to build with consumer hardware.
 
Here I had a setup that was a fraction of the cost that was out performing in real world scenarios.  The better single thread performance and higher clock speed, faster memory... it all makes sense. There's more competition in the consumer market, things cost less.
 
So I sold those servers to someone who can better utilize their resources.  Extremely nice servers but for my use case here, they had too much of everything.
 
As soon as they were sold I ordered parts for my next build.  Promptly put it together and got to testing.  Minimum, 2.5x faster at everything.  Average is 3x faster and in some cases I've seen over 6x faster.  It has completely blown me away.
 
What is the magical setup?  Nothing much really, minus storage I think it cost my about $900, including a piKVM setup to remotely control the machine.  Much less than any of my used enterprise servers cost me.
 
Here's my build.
 
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X 8-Core, 16-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series (Intel XMP 3.0) DDR5 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) 5600MT/s CL28-34-34-89 Optane 905p (zpool) and Samsung 960 Pro (OS) ASUS Prime B650-PLUS WiFi ID-COOLING IS-40-XT Black - 47mm Height Low Profile CPU Cooler EVGA 750 BP, 80+ Bronze 750W PSU Rosewill 2U Server Chassis RSV-Z2900U BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B 2PCs 19in Individually Addressable  2GB Raspberry pi4 Geekworm KVM-A8 (kit for building a piKVM) 10G network card  
It's only a 65 watt TDP CPU! very easy to cool in a constrained (or SFF) build like this.
 
A single half dollar sized CPU out performs all of my dual Xeon systems.

 
Yes, I can't run a terabyte of RAM with this setup but I don't need to.  My current systems are 128GB, I figure I only really really need 64GB with this CPU backing the system. 
 
Especially in single thread performance the new Ryzen system blows all my other systems away.  This type of gain will be felt everywhere, especially in mysql queries and responsiveness.  It still excels in multithread and even has a larger cache than my Xeons.  It really wins for me on every level.
 
And yes, RGB was a requirement.  I never put RGB in a computer, not really my thing.  But I figure this is a gaming PC at its core so for $13, why not.  I can control them in linux but it adds a bunch of unnecessary packages, I like my base PVE to be as simple as possible.  So default rainbow it is.
 
lambo-2025-lq2.mp4
 
 
I haven't been necessarily doing it wrong all these years.  Without the low TDP and high performance of the 9700X this build would be more challenging.  These are recent developments.  There's basically zero redundancy in this server.  So, it also helps having a PVE cluster that has a bunch of reliable machines, to back up this consumer grade hardware.  
 
I can't wait to bring Lambo into production!

lol
 
 

 
Freudian Slip?
 

DANG!
 
If that's what you get in "an area that's horribly overprovisioned." -- sign me up!
 
Sorry I'm slow to respond dude, been consumed with building a couple of ZFS servers on the backend. It's a process, that's just about complete.

Where are you seeing this?
 
I do need to redesign the ranking to be more user friendly.  Definitely can be done better.
 
Here's the ranking, after filtering out some of the less popular locales.  I manually do a minimum test count of 45100 because every day the host database tables that the host averages are calculated from are trimmed, to 45000.  This isn't the right way to do this because it's dependent on the time of day. 
 
I have some additional logic I'm adding to that.  Where that part of the program will be made aware of the actual recent popularity.  It will default to filtering out the less popular locations to build a better list.
 
Sorting by download speed
https://testmy.net/rank/countrycode.down/45100
 
 
Sorting by upload speed
https://testmy.net/rank/countrycode.up/45100

 
It will look different using the defaults.  It also may have been different when you looked, because of the time of day.  The tables might have just trimmed and then it happened that a bunch of tests were taking place in the locations you mentioned above.  That tool was designed before I started trimming those tables.  It was easier to sort them by popularity before they started being trimmed... after time the majority of the tables are over 45K rows making that variable unreliable.
 
Going way beyond the topic...
 
Keep in mind, I built TestMy.net with really no prior programming knowledge... starting in 1996 before it was even TestMy.net.  I then dropped out of high school in 1999, the useless information and repetition... I learn way more, much faster by DOING so I decided to focus on that.   Building this taught me and I'm always learning.  I've definitely made a lot of programming mistakes but they've all lead to a better understanding and better future designs. 
 
 
I'm a lone wolf programmer.  All of the frontend, all of the backend.  I even built the physical servers and infrastructure by hand.
 
BTW, I was like 1 or 2 credits from graduating.  Didn't really want their paper.  What does it prove?  Got hired at one of the largest telecommunication giants, quit school the next day.  Worked for them for 5 years.  Working my way up from the warehouse, within 1 year my pay increased over 6X.  That company was good to me but TestMy.net was calling, I've pursued it full time ever since.
 
Side note, if anyone actually reads this: That company had a strict policy and would have fired me if they knew I didn't have at least a GED.  No matter what my performance was in the company.  People high up (like extremely high up) told me it would be an open shut case and to keep quiet about it, "Just go get your GED dude!".  Some told me it wouldn't matter even if I got it because I should have never been hired in the first place. That attitude was actually the reason I left them.  With my own company nobody could hang anything over my head.  Yes, I probably could have just got a GED.  But why?  I don't want that.  They assumed I graduated because I had college credits, never lied to them.  Thankfully it never became an issue and I resigned on top.  Great company, they taught me a lot too.

According to hosts who've contacted me, there's an option for them to "adjust the drop off".  So they can cut off the top and bottom portions and shape the result to suit the narrative they want to paint.  I know this because they were asking me if I had those options!  Not just one or two by the way.  And they've stated that these options only exist on the higher level licenses.  So basically, if you pay them enough.  Exactly what you eluded to.
 
More reason why an unbiased third party opinion from TestMy.net is necessary.  All connections are tested under the same internal variables.  Any variable that can be controlled is controlled by YOU, the client... not your ISP.

they won't . not in SEA asia sure. ALL of their ISPs seem to use Speedtest dot net as a standard. and they're obviously bribing  Speedtest to get the results they want.
but AFAIK speedtests to USA servers are still kind of accurate... as in they're definitely much lower than the expected  100 mbps for me. i'm suppose to get 500 mbps but i am limited by hardware and USA bandwidth that is very obviously throttled.