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macOS Monterey's new network quality tool is surprisingly good
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kangaroozach 5y agoDoes it separate WiFi from internet? Seems most people don’t even understand the difference. You could have strong internet but poor WiFi in a certain spot or for a certain time.
- dtaht 5y agoWe've been having regular videoconferences to discuss this concept tuesdays 9:30 AM PDT over here: https://starwrt.v.taht.net:8443/group/bufferbloat/ https://starwrt.v.taht.net:8443/group/bufferbloat/ (use any login, no password, chrome is best) There's also the "rpm" mailing list on lists.bufferbloat.net
- dtaht 5y agoOver here we tuned up virgin media fiber to have the least latency under normal working conditions yet seen, using sqm and the sch_cake algorithm. Pretty graphs here: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/virgin-media-discussion-thread.17701788/page-1120 https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/virgin-media-discu... I don't know what rpm score that network would get as yet.
- willswire 5y agoI cooked up a little app that has a UI front-end for these statistics. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/network-quality-test/id1596010084 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/network-quality-test/id1596010...
- blakesterz 5y agoThis is a neat little tool. I had no idea that was hiding in there. Anyone have any other little hidden gems on MacOS?
- danpetrov 5y agoThere is also "networksetup", which allows you to do pretty much anything you want with network configuration. Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations.
- cromka 5y ago> Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations Can you elaborate on that a bit, please?
- exikyut 5y agoOh no. Oh no oh no. You don't mean Apple's implemented the Wi-Fi autoconfig functionality Ubuntu failed to deliver in ~2008, do you? Because if they have... they'll have done it... correctly. If the binary and/or supporting libraries have any references to FieldAgents in them... we're doomed. That's Skynet, right there.
- marcellus23 5y agoCan you expand a bit? Some quick Googling didn't reveal anything useful to me -- what exactly are you talking about?
- exikyut 5y agoSure, and apologies (I think my comment went up to 2 points but now at 0, hehe). It's a reference to https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/. :P
- qalmakka 5y agoWho thought naming a CLI tool with a camel case name was acceptable? Why isn't there a law against that?
- screenshot 5y agoInterestingly it uses their own CDN infrastructure by default by checking https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/config https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/config for which endpoint to use.
- e_proxus 5y agoThat's also the beauty of Fast.com, that it uses the Netflix content servers as benchmark and not some ISP edge hosted Speedtest server with special priority. That gives a more realistic expectation of how Netflix, and in this case Apple downloads, will actually perform. And it can't be artificially boosted by the ISP. That being said, I assume both Netflix and Apple have very special CDNs with ISP co-located content servers in many cases so it is still not a realistic measurement of generic Internet performance (but Speedtest is even worse, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- afavour 5y agoThere is a flip side to fast.com, though: it’s much more likely that it will encounter throttled speeds on mobile devices, since many unlimited plans keep the connection to Netflix artificially slow. Not endorsing that for a second but I was using fast.com as an absolute measure of internet speed until I realised this. But speedtest has the issues you’ve outlined too, there are very few 100% reliable options!
- Phemist 5y agoThe flip side was and I guess still is the exact reason for existence of fast.com. ISPs were throttling Netflix, so Netflix rolled out its own speed-testing service on its own infrastructure to publicly shame ISPs about the throttling. Without knowing about that background information, I suppose use of fast.com is a bit tricky.
- judge2020 5y agoAnother issue with Fast.com is that sometimes it'll choose an OpenConnect box, which is inherently a box at a super close ISP datacenter meant for achieving gigabit speed without the ISP incurring upstream transit costs.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y agoAn intercap in a command line tool? (Sounds good apart from that!)
- judge2020 5y agoJust tried running it on my (terribly inconsistent and laggy) directv/att satellite internet, and the process crashed with NSInvalidArgumentException. https://gist.github.com/judge2020/ff0279a51ed59a56aa184867c0896086 https://gist.github.com/judge2020/ff0279a51ed59a56aa184867c0... (14" MBP base model)
- danpetrov 5y agoHuh interesting, works fine on my 2018 Intel MBP. Surprising to see a bug like this on the newest models.
- js2 5y agoThe programmer either meant to use NSNull or setValue:forKey or simply forgot a nil check. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutabledictionary/1416335-setvalue https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutab... Pretty lame mistake to let slip through review and testing and a common enough error that Apple calls it out in its documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutabledictionary/1411616-setobject https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutab...
- ManuelKiessling 5y agoSimple! Use macOS Monterey’s new software quality tool to debug this. I’ve heard it’s surprisingly good!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- m_st 5y agoSlightly OT, but I'd like to express my astonishment about a positive article about a new tool making it to the front page. Somehow these days it's always rants about new stuff. Nice and short read.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoAren't you kind of ranting about rants? And am I ranting about you ranting about rants? :)
- ask_b123 5y agoI'd say rants are a tad longer. :)
- jmull 5y agoThis is a nice little addition. The UX is nicer than even the best web sites for this (assuming you're comfortable with the command line).
- mnadkvlb 5y agoI hope this improves the network stack in ipads as well. Now that apple has same cpu arch on both ipads and macs, i expect better network tools for ipads. I recently tried setting my ipad 5g as a hotspot but couldnt share the internet over the ethernet over my dock. If i could do that, it would enable the full 1+ gigabit 5g speeds that i get natively on ipad to the 2.5G port on the usb-c dock connected ethernet. I also tried tethering through usb-c which gave only 250mbps. Finally settled using wifi tethering which maxes around 600mbps. It would be great if there is possibility to share 5g over ethernet, that would blow any 5g hotspot out of water with the chipset apple have put in the ipads.
- ripperdoc 5y agoNice! A network tool I've always wanted is one that automates the investigation you have to do manually if you are experienceing "internet issues". I mean, the check list is quite straightforward but still a pretty manual process, stuff like: - Do I have the expected IP? - Is there large packet loss or latency issues hinting at connectivity issues? - Can I ping the local gateway? - Can I ping to outside network? - Is my nearest DNS responding? - Is another, remote DNS responding? - What does Downdetector or similar say about the service I'm trying? It would be nice with a one click tool that just went through this in order and gave a diagnosis.
- dtaht 5y agoIt's not "one click", but flent is the goto tool we use to probe networks for a multiplicity of problems. It's available for most OSes, including OSx. See flent.org.
- zimbatm 5y agoCheck out https://github.com/ycd/dstp https://github.com/ycd/dstp . It's still pretty young but it tries to solve that problem. The author needs more feedback.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago#!/bin/zsh ip addr | grep $localNetworkPrefix ping $localGateway ping 1.1.1.1 ping $DNS01 ping $DNS02 open -a Safari https://downdetector.com/status/%1 Do `chmod +x ./scriptname.sh` to make executable and run with argument (e.g. net.sh facebook) to check a particular service. Edit: Thanks @Shared404
- josephduffy 5y agoA version of this is also available on iOS (I think since iOS 15.0), although it only shows the RPM: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212313 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212313 This tool is also mentioned in that page, albeit briefly.
- miles 5y agoAs others have commented, that capital Q is a strange choice for sure, and because so many other commands begin with "network", autocomplete is needlessly distant. But it's easy enough to set "nq" as an alias for networkQuality.
- DarthNebo 5y agoIf only they fixed the tab groups issue of recurrence despite deletion & not keeping new sites in the same tab group either...
- knoebber 5y agoYou can do `networkQuality -c` and it will output json. It would be fun to make a tiny web front end for it on localhost.
- unilynx 5y agoToo bad it doesn't have a -4/-6 option. I was just debugging some connectivity issues which seem to happen only to ipv6
- SquibblesRedux 5y agoCan anyone speak to "responsiveness?" Is this essentially the inverse of latency?
- lelandbatey 5y agoInterestingly, I'm having serious problems just loading the web page; visiting the page gets me into a redirect loop, visible in cURL like so: $ curl -v --http1.1 https://danpetrov.xyz/macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html > GET /macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html HTTP/1.1 > Host: danpetrov.xyz > User-Agent: curl/7.68.0 > Accept: */* < HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently < location: https://danpetrov.xyz/macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html It's returning a 'location' that's the same as the source, leading to me never seeing the actual page. EDIT: It's back now, working and visible.
- m0dest 5y agoThis is awesome. I hope the client code will be included in the Apple's open source repository [1] after they update it for Monterey. It's hard to fully rely on a test without seeing its implementation, especially the responsiveness portion. [1] https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/
- divbzero 5y agoThis is great. I’ve encountered connectivity issues the past couple weeks and have been looking for tools like this. Are there similar tools for assessing WiFi quality and bandwidth?