Sean Posted May 9, 2015 CID Share Posted May 9, 2015 I live in the north west of Ireland which I'm fairly sure has the worst mobile coverage in the country. In my town, I get 2G-only data coverage and even in Donegal town, the Three network are having pretty bad network issues lately, especially on its uplink. As a result, the starting 96KB test TestMy does in its automatic test is enough to test the connection as it takes 15 seconds or so to complete and thus does not need to proceed to larger blocks. When I went to share the result, I just happen to notice the '96MB' test size for the upload. I am fairly certain it did not upload 96MB of data as that would have taken a few hours... The following are the last two tests I ran, one in Donegal town and the other near home where I get 2G (Edge) data coverage showing the '96MB' upload size: The upload size is shown correctly for larger blocks under 1MB, such as the following test result on my home DSL connection: On the other hand, the speed test itself appears to be the most accurate of any mobile best test I've come across to date , unlike Ookla's app that gives rather odd results such as half the downlink speed and 2x to 3x the upload speed my DSL connection is synced at. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CA3LE Posted May 13, 2015 CID Share Posted May 13, 2015 Hi editorsean! Thank you for pointing that out. What you're seeing is a long standing quirk... a bug but it's funny why it's there. The original design of the database was not well thought out. Instead of doing it over an accepting that I did it wrong the first time I instead wrote around the issues. One of the issues was that the field for test size was originally stored in kB... but the saved information was only allowed to be 5 characters long. So to express anything over 99,999 kB was impossible. Altering the massive database was not an option at the time, it would have required too much downtime. I also didn't want anyone to lose their results. So I started storing by MB in some instances and by kB in others. So 200 MB will save as "200" -- 400 kB saves as "400" 50 MB is saved as "51200". The newer databases are correctly storing the data by kB but they're largely behind the scenes right now. Eventually it won't have to store in tricky ways. ...When the TMN database (mySQL driven) was first started I had absolutely no knowledge of databasing... I'm sure I still do it the wrong way but it's working on a large scale and takes little resources so I can't complain. Keep learning and keep improving. mudmanc4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sean Posted May 13, 2015 Author CID Share Posted May 13, 2015 Good explanation. I'm sure very few (if any) connections required a test block size approaching 100MB at that time, whereas now some some of the bigger towns are getting 1Gbps fibre. I'm only just learning MySQL and PHP. I see you fixed it. The result I posted on another forum now also shows '96kB'. I remember a few years ago I tried reporting a bug to Ookla about its Speedtest app reporting faster uplink speeds 2 to 3 times faster than my DSL's physical link speed and they came back asking me to run more tests with other servers to confirm its not a problem with my Internet connection. Obviously if the test result is reporting faster than the physical link speed, it's not an ISP issue. mudmanc4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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