How do I use one of the Mercury Test Sites?

[fey42]

First I am being brand spanking new to all of this.

Second I am trying to resolve a Netflix streaming issue for a neighbor who doesn't even know where to begin (I'm just slightly smarter). His dataset is hjb44.

Third I have been using TMN for three days now and love it. It showed the problem the very first run. His download was all over the map from 8Mb to 750Kb.

 

Instead of testing to San Francisco I would like to test to someplace closer, in fact I know the IP address of Netfix in Portland, but tracert quits after the third hop.

I live just 70 miles south, I know that has zero bearing on the issue; I am at the mercy of routing. Did a tracert to oregonlive.com (Portland newspaper) and it went to Seattle, to San Jose, then to Portland.

 

How do I go about using one of the Mercury Test Site? Is that portion of code even working?

Remember I warned you I am brand new at this.

 

Thanks, Fred

[mudmanc4]

Hi @fey42 ,

 Mercury is a very interesting resource that testmy.net offers. Mercury gives the user the opportunity to submit their own image, from anywhere for testing purposes. As well as allows others to use that submission for testing.

 

I for one have found Mercury to be useful when I notice a slow website, I can then grab the image URI from checking the source code (or many times just using basic browsing tools such as 'view image' or 'inspect element', then submit that image for testing without other site resources.

I've also used it for testing a specific location of the image source. You can get a very fine grained result, as you know where you want to test, and what size.

 

As you notice the selectable parameters:

 

Where the 'ReqSz' or 'Request Size' would be the factor which you choose the actual download size.

 

I would likely give the incorrect explanation of the other two, so I'll leave that for someone else who can explain it better.