Smith6612

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Happy Testing!

Here's some more food for thought. Did Comcast give you a DOCSIS 3.0 modem? 30Mbps/6Mbps has almost an indefinite requirement for a DOCSIS 3.0 modem especially due to the upstream and downstream requirements. 30Mbps is near the limit of most QAM265 systems per downstream channel. If they gave you a D2 modem, get it swapped for a D3. That should fix the slow speed issues you're seeing. At the lower packages, a DOCSIS 2.0 modem does work fine.

EDIT: Re-read the orignal post. That's a DOCSIS 2.0 modem. Also, from my own experience with the RCA/Thompson DCM425 units, those things are awful. It may just be the way Time Warner configures them or their firmware though! With my own experience, the RCA modem you have chokes at around 10Mbps, and often locks transfers at an unstable 8-12Mbps, and while it can do PowerBoost up to 30Mbps on 10-15Mbps profiles, it really struggles in real life transfers. I'm not quite sure how it performs in bridge mode though!

If you're out of range, it doesn't mean you cannot get service. Hughes might be able to get you running on their Gen4 satellites, but keep in mind, it might be the same deal with being outside of the usable range of DSL or for that matter, wireless service. It may work, but if the powers that be (usually weather) decide, your service may be far more likely to degrade or go out. With satellite, you're very prone to rain fade if you have a marginal signal as is.

nginx is an amazing piece of software. Light, fast, and as everyone mentions it holds out pretty well against abuse. I use it on my dedicated server to run several websites (mostly hosted for others) that do pick up a bit of traffic running forums. The box itself is often under heavy load, and Apache would start to grind to a halt with the load the machine is under.

The connection limit is for being a good netizen. While there are standards, you can enable pipelining which helps more than spawning a boatload of connections as you go. Just remember, more connections results in more server load and more overhead on your network and the server, so use it in moderation. Some servers are aggressive with the amount of connections they allow as well, and will firewall you if you spawn too many in a short amount of time.

Agreed. For the most part, the only problems I've ever seen with my connection were due to some sort of poor transit between some connection in my ISP's network to some connection who knows where. What does bother me however is, as you've mentioned, the networks were designed so long ago to where you've got many redundant systems tying into a single failure point, or many going into few which causes issues such as slow speeds, or, which Verizon is currently overdue for this year, routing outages in NYC that take out 95% of my Internet connectivity completely but do not destroy speeds. If it's not that, you've also got plenty of older systems that just have not been invested in and are having to handle loads that they can take, but don't allow for smooth failover. Or for that matter, old systems that choke down at night because they were set up with too much oversubscription (such as my local Cable Company's network/backbone).

Then of course, there are providers who just don't plan their networks for double growth (Moore's Law, in perspective) or upgrade them fast enough for whatever reason. I know my second ISP, Frontier Communnications is one of these. Their services are known to slow down at night due to lack of transit capacity or overloaded routers during the night time hours. They're starting to fix all of that up now that they're *FINALLY* bringing out the bigger guns. My Frontier connection before the days of streaming and YouTube in HD was pretty solid. Come all of the big streaming services like Netflix, and higher quality video, I started seeing speeds dropping from 3Mbps down to 1Mbps at night, perhaps lower depending on the day as the edge router at the ISP got overloaded, the old SONET rings not having been upgraded, and so on.

I do know that part of the problem here is with an ISP saying they don't guarantee speeds (and none can), but if it's something that happens routinely according to events, or time of day it's something they have to work to fix up.

Upgrades have been getting done though, which is fortunately something that is being done here in the East. The problem is with old last mile infrustructure and underutilized long haul cable, and of course poor routing to other areas.

I do like the new look and feel of the new site. Not much to say besides that.

I actually made that change specifically for the iPad and other touch devices... this version runs and navigates much smoother on those devices. I also purposely timed this release right before the new iPhone comes out.

I may add retesting buttons on the results page later... but the reason I didn't put them in this design is because I want people to navigate more through the site. If people get up into the menus more they're more likely to see more of what the site has to offer that they may have missed otherwise. This was a decision I made based on analytics data.

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I'm glad you're liking it.

I wasn't calling you a Mac hater.. just talking in general.

Wine has always been buggy for me... trying to run games with it is asking for trouble. You can always use parallels, boot camp or dual boot. I personally just use parallels with windows 7 when I want to game and it works perfectly for me... although I rarely game on my computer anymore. PCs are better for gaming but then again, its not like you have a choice most of the time. Games are mostly made for consoles and PC not Mac. I'd bet that the big name game producers have contracts with Microsoft.

... Mac has superior hardware. Not to say that you can't get great hardware otherwise. Hell, in many cases you can get more powerful hardware cheaper if you build a PC or get a top end brand. But you're going to to start getting up into the price of a Mac... so why not get a superior OS along with it. Apple makes great decisions in the hardware they use... there is no low end. This one of the reasons why when they choose something, they stick with it for a long time... they make the right choice up front and stick with it for a while. Towards the end of the production life of a given technology they end up making more money too because they're producing the same thing... which brings their cost down.

I used to build all my own computers, always with the bleeding edge hardware available. But I've found that Apple really does have a strong formula for stability. These days, I'll sacrifice bleeding edge technology for more stability. Even my Mac mini is overpowered for my personal needs, my iMac is just ridiculous.

Having said that... Macs can TOTALLY get viruses. It's a computer... even if an operating system were to run on millions of users computers for years on end without and exploit doesn't mean that there is no exploit. Something that is written by one man can be exploited by another. Macs do however have a lot working in their favor.

First, it's a unix base. There is a reason why it's the chosen operating system for the most secure applications on the planet. I have ALWAYS run unix base here at TMN, I've been exploited but never through the operating system itself. I get between 10-500 hacking attempts every day on this server alone. Any security holes were due to 3rd party software running on the machine... not the operating system. RHE since day one btw.
Second, which I believe will eventually change... security by minority... most people are using Windows so most people writing viruses are gearing them towards Windows machines. Most people that write viruses want to target the majority and they're also adept to IBM based machines. When more people are on Macs that will change... but Apple is going to make it much harder on them... so they stick to the easy money so to speak.
Third, security by obscurity... if the hackers don't fully understand the command set of the hardware it's a lot harder to program viruses to exploit it. Apple is secretive in many aspects which keeps the hackers in the dark. Put a blindfold on a programmer and it's pretty hard for them to even begin to understand how to hurt you... information can however get leaked... but can also patched just as quickly.


To be honest... I'm not wasting my system resources with antivirus software on my Macs either... but don't EVER think that you're safe just because you're on a Mac. There is no such thing. I don't care who says so... everything digital has a weakness, even the most cryptic can be exploited if you know the key to how it works. Even, in the future, if there is 1 in a Googolplex chance of it happening... there is still a chance. Like I said.. if it was made by a man... there is a man that can break it. (or woman, damn feminists... you know what I mean!)

... personally, I take the chance. I also took the chance on my PCs for the most part. I'm a strong believer in that you... for the most part... often infect yourself by being stupid. If you know what to look for, you can avoid a large majority of viruses. For me, I didn't care if everything got messed up... I reformatted nearly every month or so anyways. I'd rather have my resources free for myself ... A/V is a waste of computing power. Since I switched over to Mac the only time I've formatted a system drive was because I was upgrading the drive. I must say it's very nice not having to set all my stuff up every few months. .... and if I did, TIME MACHINE! BAM! Back to how it was.

... and for all you Mac haters... STFU and try one, stop talking sh*t on stuff you know nothing about. If you knew... you wouldn't talk sh*t... plain and simple. This is all coming from a former die hard Mac hater. Funny thing is, first computer I ever touched was Unix based (my Mom brought it home as surplus from the hospital she worked at... well still works at) then I grew up on Macs at school... loved them. They taught me to love computing. They lost their way in the early 90's but you know what... Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and set them back on the right path. Then they went to Intel... opening up development to more software manufactures. Now with their architecture and mindset there is NO excuse to hate them at this point other than ignorance.

If you don't already, use a Mac for 1 month... then I dare you to go back. If you do as much on the computer as I do you'll feel like someone cut off your arms. It's the Microsoft way of thinking that's actually backwards, people have just been conditioned otherwise.

The thing with Apple and their operating system, and the reason why it doesn't "quite" bog down as much as Windows is known to do is due to the fact that it is practically a highly customized varient of BSD, a flavor of Unix. I like to call it "Bastardized" since you can pretty much run any Unix application you'd like on a Mac out of the box, but there are some things that just don't make sense. Apple did after all, take forever to become POSIX compliant, which began starting with Lion. But otherwise, UNIX as a heart it's obviously going to be a bit more stable. The file system I'm sure also has better management compared to NTFS, but I suppose it also depends on your use since each File System has their own performance characteristics too.

FYI: I have a Windows 3.1 machine that still continues to run from this day, running an Intel 386. I also have a Dell Inspiron from 1999 with one of the original Mobile Pentium III CPUs, that thing continues to run Windows 2000 (and DSL or Knoppix, depending on whichever I decide to choose) and with the original battery, somehow it still holds 1 hour of charge. Some old desktops I built in the 90s and early 2000s are still going as well. All of my hardware goes through quite a bit of use.

On all of the 16 systems I have at home (12 of which are still in full time use, all of the desktops are ones I've built), I've probably only had one GPU in one of the gaming systems go due to a design flaw with the card, which I could replace on the spot. One of the machines from 2002 actually runs Windows 7 Ultimate N 32-bit, and the thing is booting in 25 seconds flat from POST to desktop. Other than that, no hardware problems.

Anyways, as far as the Mac goes, $1.7 Grand is a bit hefty for a machine with only an i5, 13.3" display and possibly Integrated Graphics (Sandybridge). For that sort of price I'd expect dedicated GPU from NVIDIA or AMD, a mid-range i7, perhaps an SSD along with a good chunk of RAM (8GB of DDR3 goodness with a high clock), oh and of course plenty of room to allow the fans to breathe, something Macs have issues with. If it's Intel HD Graphics anything with an I5 at 13.3" you're looking at a $1,000 machine from Apple with a Mechanical HDD and probably 4-6GB of RAM. Macs are well-built machines though, I will say that. I see plenty of older machines continuing to run just as well as they did the day they were unboxed.

Oh yeah, UEFI = awesome. Macs have been in the EFI game for a while, which is amazing and part of the reason why they do boot quickly. BIOS is a dinosaur. UEFI support is still iffy on Mac but once you get it working, any capable OS takes literally no time at all on an SSD. 2 second boot time anyone?

Ooops Smith6612 sorry I missed your post and links ,
my bad on that , especialy
thats got me thinking Picard is a French name ( from Picardy ) now I am wondering, as I thought ,are all French guys gay
that vid don't help , LOL
BTW that a in joke between the English and French , indeed the insults still flow both ways ,

True, considering most home routers are already subject to ISP QoS policies at the edge and the home routers already have too much other nonsense running on them to bog them down. Not much you can do when your router's just going to queue up data at the WAN as far as downstream QoS/Traffic Shaping goes. Upstream QoS unless you have FiOS or another symmetrical fiber plan is almost a definite must though. Any router that was built to do QoS in the hardware itself (which is significantly faster and does not tear at the CPU as much) would be suggested for QoS in the home.

My router at home is a few years old, but it has a 532Mhz CPU from Intel that is ARM-based. It's 32-bit, not exactly 64-bit or Dual core like the newer generations of the router I have but the thing is a powerhouse. It's WAN <> LAN Throughput exceeds 100Mbps and that's with QoS services enabled. I don't run anything such as a Samba share or a Print server off of it which cuts down on all the rediculousness, but it is quite a workhorse. CPU load hardly has to work.

Time: 06:58:15 up 284 days, 8:22, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I know with the ASUS routers and even D-Links there are these fancy Automatic QoS settings that are sometimes enabled by default. I would definitely try disabling any QoS setting in the router that relates to the WAN connection. Wireless QoS such as WMM can remain on and must be on for Wireless N devices. Also, some newer cable modems are coming with firewalls built-in to them. If your provider uses Ubee or Motorola Gateways for example, I find the firewall in the modem is often to blame for poor speeds, and these often include settings under the guise of "IP Flood Detection" or another term. Shutting that off entirely and bridging the modem too helps.

But definitely, rule out all QoS/GameBooster settings and also rule out any hardware-based firewalls. If you're still seeing issues, definitely check your cable signal levels too. You may be erroring out just enough to kill speeds but not enough to kill the connection entirely. That stuff isn't just with DSL and Fiber

I just ran a few more tests. I'm afraid I may still be seeing this problem but it disappears when I press the "Re-Test" button at the top of the page. The tests are showing half of the upload rate i'm actually hitting. A 384KB file completed in around 4 seconds, whereas the test states my speed was around 340kbps which wouldn't upload that big of a file that quick.

I do notice something interesting here and I believe I discovered the issue I'm seeing with upload testing. I noticed that when I performed a test initially, the test would upload more data than it was supposed to. For example, selecting East Coast (closest to me) and then choosing 1.5MB of data would upload 2.7MB of data instead. If I press Re-test at the results page, the correct amount of data is uploaded and I see a proper result. I see this on each server, by the way.

Here's a video I uploaded to YouTube to demonstrate this:


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Keep an eye on my line monitoring gadget. Notice, it will peg the upload at full speed but the first test always takes longer to run even if it got up to speed right away! The tally of data is showing extra data being uploaded, which I presume is skewing the results. I'm not quite sure what's happening here, but I am using Firefox 15 at the moment. I do NOT see this issue in IE, however. Google Chrome I'm not quite sure about nor Safari.

Hey guys, I'm not quite sure if I reported this previously. I remember tying up this post some time ago and then forgetting to submit it afterwards. Anyways, it seems the current version of testmy.net has a few issues that should be addressed.

1: For those of us who like running a more sustained download and upload test for, say connections that need time to ramp up the speed on the upload (due to TCP/IP Auto-tuning, server settings, routes, etc) but have slower connections such as a 768kbps upload, I find that to servers such as the East Coast server if the upload test doesn't complete in a certain amount of time the file finishes uploading and I never receive a result back, instead getting a connection reset message. Sometimes it goes through but it's generally to a connection reset most attempts. I do not see these issues with fast connections or short (10 second) tests.

2: It seems as though the upload speed test has an issue where it is reporting a speed based on how long the test took. From what I see on my network monitor here when doing a 29.2MB test, I can see the line pushing 85-90KB/s solid according to a WAN network graph built-in to my router (DD-WRT and a Windows Network meter) however testmy.net reports back indicating the speed is half of that, at about 40KB/s or about 320Kbps. This is a random problem that seems to occur regardless of how long the test runs, but it seems improved in some browsers such as IE instead of others such as Firefox and Chrome. I know Firefox has an option to adjust the Sending Buffer, but this doesn't make a difference. It almost seems like it's something Javascript or test related since the upload file seems to be dynamically generated.

3: On machines with a small amount of RAM or a weak CPU, it seems the upload test when running a large file test (most often 17.5MB and higher files) tends to cause the browser to consume a good amount of processor time, depending on the browser of course (this mainly includes IE and Chrome). In addition, the browser uses double to triple the amount of additional memory based on the test size. This may be something to fix as it really decreases the performance of the test.