4 ms·

I always liked gfblip: http://gfblip.appspot.com/ http://gfblip.appspot.com/ You can run this on your laptop and watch your WiFi drop in and out randomly (as o

I always liked gfblip: http://gfblip.appspot.com/ http://gfblip.appspot.com/ You can run this on your laptop and watch your WiFi drop in and out randomly (as other people around you download stuff, as Bluetooth devices interfere with it, etc.) It's also fun to run a speed test in another tab, and watch the latency increase 10x as needless buffers fill up and your latency-sensitive packets wait in line so your router gets a better review!

Tarrosion 6y ago
I found that tool from Ben Kuhn's blog, and at first it seemed great. But I've seen some weird behavior from it. Examples include drastically different behavior on a refresh (and not just for the 'blue' website, also for gstatic.com) and pings to Madagascar which are apparently faster than the speed of light. So now I'm somewhere between confused and distrustful. If anyone has a detailed guide on using gfblip I'd be really curious to read it.
- diggan 6y ago
  > If anyone has a detailed guide on using gfblip I'd be really curious to read it. Check out the instructions in the GitHub repository, has two versions, neither are very long nor complex. https://github.com/apenwarr/blip https://github.com/apenwarr/blip
ngold 6y ago
That's a fun link.
gojomo 6y ago
Intriguing, but: I don't think it's working as intended from my Brave browser. After about 2 seconds of blue/green pings that seem faster than should be possible (<10ms), it goes full red. It does work in Chrome! (Perhaps, Brave is doing some faster-fail on the probe request from the beginning, and then a cached-insta-failure after ~2 seconds?)
- diggan 6y ago
  Had the same issue here, Brave blocks "insecure" scripts, you'll see a warning in the address bar and need to allow it to load those scripts to get it to work correctly.
  - gojomo 6y ago
    Hmm, I'm not seeing that warning, & see the same problem behavior even with 'shields down' for the site.
bentcorner 6y ago
FYI - if you're getting a max red line on this site make sure you're not using the https version (and you may need to whitelist it in https-everywhere).
kqr 6y ago
Regular old time series are such a powerful tool!
GoatOfAplomb 6y ago
My green pings to gstatic are steady, 19-21ms. My blue pings to calgary are reliably ~2000ms then ~200ms. I wonder where in the chain that pattern is originating. I wonder if it'll stay like that over time.
justaj 6y ago
Comparing performance of this page between Chromium and Firefox is just very depressing :(
- capableweb 6y ago
  Agree! I wonder why the performance in Chrome is so much worse than Firefox? I constantly have ~100ms higher values in Chrome than Firefox. Maybe the author is using Firefox for development, so the test is optimized for Firefox. Chrome also seems to show red dots every ~3 seconds for me, while Firefox shows no red dots, strange. Tested on Ubuntu.
  - samoa42 6y ago
    the github description says that it is not directly measuring the roundtrip time but the time until the browser returns an xss-error. so browsers behave differently...

Tarrosion 6y ago

I found that tool from Ben Kuhn's blog, and at first it seemed great. But I've seen some weird behavior from it. Examples include drastically different behavior on a refresh (and not just for the 'blue' website, also for gstatic.com) and pings to Madagascar which are apparently faster than the speed of light. So now I'm somewhere between confused and distrustful. If anyone has a detailed guide on using gfblip I'd be really curious to read it.

diggan 6y ago
> If anyone has a detailed guide on using gfblip I'd be really curious to read it. Check out the instructions in the GitHub repository, has two versions, neither are very long nor complex. https://github.com/apenwarr/blip https://github.com/apenwarr/blip

ngold 6y ago

That's a fun link.

gojomo 6y ago

Intriguing, but: I don't think it's working as intended from my Brave browser. After about 2 seconds of blue/green pings that seem faster than should be possible (<10ms), it goes full red. It does work in Chrome! (Perhaps, Brave is doing some faster-fail on the probe request from the beginning, and then a cached-insta-failure after ~2 seconds?)

diggan 6y ago
Had the same issue here, Brave blocks "insecure" scripts, you'll see a warning in the address bar and need to allow it to load those scripts to get it to work correctly.
- gojomo 6y ago
  Hmm, I'm not seeing that warning, & see the same problem behavior even with 'shields down' for the site.

bentcorner 6y ago

FYI - if you're getting a max red line on this site make sure you're not using the https version (and you may need to whitelist it in https-everywhere).

kqr 6y ago

Regular old time series are such a powerful tool!

GoatOfAplomb 6y ago

My green pings to gstatic are steady, 19-21ms. My blue pings to calgary are reliably ~2000ms then ~200ms. I wonder where in the chain that pattern is originating. I wonder if it'll stay like that over time.

justaj 6y ago

Comparing performance of this page between Chromium and Firefox is just very depressing :(

capableweb 6y ago
Agree! I wonder why the performance in Chrome is so much worse than Firefox? I constantly have ~100ms higher values in Chrome than Firefox. Maybe the author is using Firefox for development, so the test is optimized for Firefox. Chrome also seems to show red dots every ~3 seconds for me, while Firefox shows no red dots, strange. Tested on Ubuntu.
- samoa42 6y ago
  the github description says that it is not directly measuring the roundtrip time but the time until the browser returns an xss-error. so browsers behave differently...