Auto Speed Test stopped with "Server not found"

[Drip LeBuk]

I use the Auto Speed Test feature of testmy.net a lot, to monitor every 15 minutes the upload and download performance of my poor performing fibre connection.  I use a dedicated old laptop running Windows Vista (which I keep up to date) with Mozilla Firefox (which I keep up to date).  The machine is wired to the router, Wi-Fi is switched off.

 

In my house I have quite a few internet connected devices of all different types and I live in a rural area in the UK thought to use aluminium as well as copper cables en route to the nearest cabinet.  Test results show the speed is periodically variable, though the underlining rate is usually clear to see.

 

We have always suffered terminal connectivity issues; DSL sessions restarting, new browser requests failing while others still connect, periods when no browser on any device will work for short periods and then start-up inexplicably, periods when ping tests from the diagnostics page of the router gets 100% packet loss.  Safe to say then that the connection itself is often unstable.

 

While the Auto Speed Test is good at showing speed variations I often find that no results have been recorded and the browser tab running the Auto Speed Test is left showing a ‘Server not found’ error.  When I press retry, the test resumes and is OK.

 

Is there no way that the Auto Speed Test cannot be improved to be more resilient to connectivity failures?  Are different browsers more resilient?  I quite agree that technology like Adobe Flash or Java should not be used to perform the actual speed tests, but perhaps there is technology out there that could be used to help automatically recover failed speed tests.  Recording such restarts though would be valuable evidence for my ISP.

[Sean]

You can try the command line based test I wrote in this earlier thread.   That batch file runs a TestMy download and upload test in 15 minute intervals until the command prompt window is closed and is not affected by Internet downtime. 

 

I wrote it when I was with a fixed wireless ISP that kept going down, which gave me the same issue with the site's auto test. One small side effect with the script is that it runs each test in a new tab, so you'll probably have a 100 or so tabs open by the time you return.