24 ms·

Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

• AlexandrB 4y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the ISP was doing something like this. It's an easy way to make their service look better and there are few consequences for getting caught. It's also hard to prove conclusively that it's happening.
• thayne 4y ago
  I've also noticed this, at least subjectively. I haven't done any rigorous experiments to confirm this is actually happening, but my ISP has a reputation for doing shady stuff, so it wouldn't surprise me if they prioritized traffic to speed test sites.
• lostlogin 4y ago
  Another weird one: Open fast.com and check your speed. Now reload the page and and run it again but as soon as it starts, open another tab and do some browsing. The second test gives me higher speeds consistently.
  • toxicFork 4y ago
    Of course, the pipes are unclogged
• b20000 4y ago
  i am using spectrum business and i’ve been paying close to $200/m. this is in LA in a residential building. the speed looks good when i run a test but i notice that page loading times are total shit at least initially. if i start a download for a video game that ramps up quickly in speed but i actually don’t need that. what i really want is very fast resolving and page loading, which is different than just large downloads. i am wondering if other people here have the same problem and what they have done to fix this. i have been thinking about trying to replace my spectrum router with a pfsense box while still using their modem. but not sure if that will fix the issue. i use debian workstations and have gigabit ethernet for my internal network.
  • canadaduane 4y ago
    It sounds like you want lower latency?
    • b20000 4y ago
      i guess so, i want instant page loads, i care less whether transfer is 4 or 5 MB/s
  • dboreham 4y ago
    My experience with Spectrum is that they allow a large accumulation of in-transit packets when traffic rate is near the provisioned capacity. Some people call this "buffer bloat". Some background: If you study traffic shaping, you'll discover that TCP behaves poorly if packets are simply dropped when throughput approaches the limit (congestion collapse). So traffic shaping usually _delays_ packets rather than dropping, at least initially. This works in that TCP backs off its send rate gracefully and throughput approaches the provisioned limit. However you've now introduced a large delay into every packet's transit through the shaper box. This isn't a problem for bulk TCP flows -- they work ok in the presence of latency but it is problematic for unrelated latency sensitive traffic (e.g. UDP, SSH). To work around this problem traffic shaping usually introduces some notion of delay per flow. This can be done in a few different ways e.g. RED (random early detection), or per-flow queues. Ok so back to Spectrum: my experience has been that their shaper box does not do anything good as far as per-flow queues, RED etc. It seems pretty basic and dumb. The result is that latency approaches infinity as throughput approaches the provisioned limit. I work around this by deploying my own shaping on my edge router. Through experiment, I have configured it to limit at just below the threshold where Spectrum begins severely delaying my traffic. I use RED on my router to give good latency for traffic unrelated to bulk flows. You'll need a router capable of traffic shaping, e.g. Mikrotik, Linux iptraf, Cisco IOS.
    • b20000 4y ago
      thanks. would you recommend building a linux router then or buying one off the shelf ready to go?
    • 4y ago
• Proudmuslim 4y ago
  I notice this too! I really hope I'm insane, because the implications of this are... concerning
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  So the trick is to always be running a speed-test in the background?
  • medstrom 4y ago
    A simple Bash loop could suffice, if it's enough to ping the site: while : do ping speedcheck.org ; sleep 10 ; done Fast internet forever!
    • Jamie9912 4y ago
      an ICMP ping is not a "connection"..
      • medstrom 4y ago
        True, edited.
  • RachelF 4y ago
    They now have a CLI speedtest app: https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    I nearly did this, but because I was having connection issues. I got it to post to Slack every 15 mins and to post to an alert channel if speed was less than a certain value (something like 3Mbps, crazy low). I would log the fault from work and it would be fixed by the time I got home. However I have fibre now, and it’s glorious. No crap scripts required (though it still runs!).
    • withinboredom 4y ago
      Sounds like the speed tests are filling your buffers, allowing your router to do proper QOS and prioritize your packets correctly. Do you have QOS turned on? You might want to turn it off since it sounds misconfigured. You can check here: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
• btown 4y ago
  Impossible to know for sure, but the ROI on “accelerate packets that match an IP whitelist that is drawn nightly from the DNS records for well-traveled speed test sites” must be quite high.
  • CursedUrn 4y ago
    Could speed test sites do something about this? Like obfuscate the traffic somehow to get more genuine results?
    • bfz 4y ago
      It's possible to build a speed test site out of media file fetches from otherwise public assets from third party sites, the quality of the measurement will just be a little noisier. In many ways this would actually be a better test than some well-placed IP address, since there is a chance to randomly sample many different routes from the ISP to real world destinations for practical object sizes (i.e., not just an idealized unidirectional stream with no request roundtrips in between). For example you could do something with Image.onload event, but even better are the recent JS web performance APIs, they provide a huge amount of detail - including DNS lookup latency, TCP connect time, TTFB etc. Actually now I want to build this edit: I'm probably not going to build this, but you should. For large object sources, there are Flickr full size images, HLS URLs for video on demand systems (each HLS segment is generally around 1-3MB), etc. I'd want a giant list of these to pick from at random, and probably want to bucket the results along (domain name, destination BGP ASN, destination GeoIP) axes as well as whatever the JS performance API offers. You could maybe present each axis as some kind of confidence interval, then geometric mean to produce an overall score presented graphically somehow You could then collect up all these scores and publish stats bucketed by Internet provider. And that's the point where I realized I don't have the energy to build all this ;)
      • canadaduane 4y ago
        This sounds so much closer to a "real" test than our single-server tests.
      • 4y ago
• vyrotek 4y ago
  This is one feature I like from my Wifi router. It does regular speed tests and tracks the results over time. I like to think it reminds my ISP that I want the speed I'm paying for.
  • tentacleuno 4y ago
    Is that with dd-wrt or something similar? I heavily doubt you'd get that feature on an ISP router :-)
    • jamesmunns 4y ago
      Unifi routers do this, for sure.
  • thefreeman 4y ago
    if this is theoretically saturating your bandwidth doesn't this lead to intermittent poor performance from your connected devices?
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Saturating download can prevent acks from getting through in some cases on some mediums. So throttling download a bit speeds everything else up.
• xioren00 4y ago
  This is real. I have had it confirmed to me by a Comcast employee. And really, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
  • ChaosMarine 4y ago
    Just because they can do it should not be a reason for doing it. You're broken in, defatist or conformist.
    • cstrahan 4y ago
      Not being surprised is not the same as being defeatist/conformist. There are things I would love to see changed that don’t surprise me, and there are things that surprise me that I see no reason to change. One does not imply the other.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • asdff 4y ago
    How frequently do you need to ping speedtest to be prioritized?
• brahma-dev 4y ago
  Not very scientific but you can try something that is unlikely to be whitelisted. Eg. http://134.209.196.181:8080 http://134.209.196.181:8080 This is an instance of https://github.com/e7d/speedtest https://github.com/e7d/speedtest running on Digital Ocean in Amsterdam.
  • femto113 4y ago
    Interesting. Using Wave broadband in Seattle from this server I get 38.69 Mbps Download 154.43 Mbps Upload While from speedtest.net (to a local server) I get 178.34 Mbps Download 192.23 Mbps Upload I'd chalk it up to distance/noise except that the download speeds are way more similar than the upload speeds.
  • jshier 4y ago
    Or just running iperf on a personal server. I use that to diagnose differences between raw UDP / TCP throughput and HTTP.
  • kristopolous 4y ago
    I'm in Los Angeles. My downstream is half using this tool compared to the one built into Google. That's reasonable, actually pretty impressive for talking to Amsterdam It's hard to really comprehend how amazing it is that I can talk to Europe at 200M/s over WiFi from my personal apartment on my smartphone while lying in bed in Los Angeles, and pay a flat rate that works out to about $2.25/day for the privilege. It's just absurd. It's pretty easy to forget how much of a future world we live in
    • belter 4y ago
      Amsterdam is a kind of special case as its where major internet providers peer with each other via the AMS-IX https://www.ams-ix.net/ams https://www.ams-ix.net/ams You should try if possible connections to other pages in other countries.
• dathinab 4y ago
  A twitch art vtuber steamer had a similar realization: Running certain online games in the background (I think it was final fantasy) fixed problems with the art/drawing/just chatting stream dropping frames. (Sorry I forget who, I also think it wasn't someone I normally watch so it's unlikely I will remember.)
• FredPret 4y ago
  I wonder if one could route all traffic through a speedtest site
  • zorr 4y ago
    That's basically what Netflix does with its fast.com service. This could be an interesting business model for a VPN service. Host a popular speedtest and VPN endpoints on the same IP's. The challenge is to make the speedtest popular enough so ISP's will optimize for it.
    • FredPret 4y ago
      It would be cool if all our devices could talk to one another directly in a huge mesh network with no ISPs whatsoever. I do so detest the usual ISP user experience
• pojzon 4y ago
  I was cursing on my ISP for a long time till I understood that Im on a 100Mbit wifi. Then added a wire connection to my server and instantly 10x the speed :^] Dont be like me, have wires set up everywhere where needed.
  • vmception 4y ago
    My local wifi is faster than my 1gb/s ethernet. This holds true in the same room and one room over. I like this.
    • KerrAvon 4y ago
      If you’re happy, great. But you might want to figure out what’s interfering with your wired bandwidth, because wired 1G ethernet should basically win every time compared to current WiFi standards. Maybe not ax under ideal conditions. But that’s a maybe.
      • vmception 4y ago
        1G ethernet is 125 megabytes (spelled out to avoid acronym ambiguity) per second 802.11ax is much faster than that, my wifi router is good for 1.5G or so while the protocol allows for 3.5G or so and my file transfer speeds are easily more than 125 megabytes per second I’m not going to run more wires either way So……. you sure I should care? Its great fast speeds that scale to the file sizes I want to handle, which are pretty large for prosumer needs.
        • Jolter 4y ago
          I won’t dispute your numbers, but have you measured latency and jitter? Some people who like to call themselves hard-core gamers care a lot about those metrics, and Wi-Fi has historically been pretty abysmal at latency. I don’t know if the latest standards have caught up with wired yet.
  • caymanjim 4y ago
    Wires are great, and I try to use them when possible, but you can saturate most home Internet with decent midrange WiFi hardware. I get over 1Gbps between local machines just using the stock Comcast/Xfinity WAP, and about 330Mbps to the Internet (capped by service plan). I splurged a little on a ~$120 4-antenna NIC but even my cheap older ones can saturate the WAN link.
• UI_at_80x24 4y ago
  I was on the phone with a buddy trying to troubleshoot Local file transfer speeds vs Speedtest results. Speedtest kept reporting 100Mb/s range speeds (the tier he was paying for). Local file transfers however were stuck in the 1MB/s range. After some questions and troubleshooting he discovered that he had used a 10Mb/s hub instead of a 1Gb/s switch that was sitting right next to it. A simple mixup. His internet connection was also plugged into that same 10Mb/s hub. There is NO WAY his PC could have reported 100Mb/s to speedtest. Do not trust them for accurate results.
  • cj 4y ago
    Edit: removed due to downvoting. Original comment pointed out that transfer speed is normally measured in Mbps not MB/s.
    • djbusby 4y ago
      Can't get 100 Megabits on a 10 Megabit line was the point.
    • Diesel555 4y ago
      > Speedtest kept reporting 100Mb/s range speeds (the tier he was paying for). Local file transfers however were stuck in the 1MB/s range I read that speed test reported 100Mb/s and local files were receiving 8Mb/s (1MB/s). Either interpretation doesn’t change the intent much. But now I’m curious if the MB was intentional. I don’t really care what the normal convention is, but the fact that Mbps and MB/s are sometimes used interchangeably does cause confusion, especially outside this environment. Was the choice to use Mbps as a standard a marketing idea? Like they have 1 MB/s? Well we have 8 Mb/s.
      • UI_at_80x24 4y ago
        Yes I did intentionally mix the units up. I know it's not best practice but I also know that most people that frequent this site are aware enough of the differences to not get fooled/confused. To be honest it was just lazy writing on my part.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Welcome to the world of traffic shaping and QoS.
• pmalynin 4y ago
  fast.com is pretty much the only one I use these days, since that uses Netflix’s servers.
• ranger207 4y ago
  Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...
  • bzxcvbn 4y ago
    And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.
    • WanderPanda 4y ago
      *should be an option that you can book at your ISP.
      • aaomidi 4y ago
        Please elaborate
      • WarChortle18 4y ago
        Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would that work? This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition. So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.
    • bmitc 4y ago
      It's also an example of how it's already been lost.
      • mnd999 4y ago
        That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
• raggi 4y ago
  Study the traffic in Wireshark, and also sniff upstream of your router to compare. I'd bet it's your router before I'd bet it's your isp. I gave up with cots routers a while back, and life has been significantly improved. I wrote it up here https://res.rag.pub/2020-11-1-an-home-router.html https://res.rag.pub/2020-11-1-an-home-router.html
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Downloading a large file from Microsoft is a good test (their end wont be the bottleneck, and they have a lot of large files you can download)
• conorcleary 4y ago
  All those ads...
• traceroute66 4y ago
  Lots of people here have already mentioned the Netflix fast.com test, which is indeed good. But also worthy of recommendation IHMO is the Cloudflare one (speed.cloudflare.com). Main reason I say that is its one of the few that measures jitter (or at least openly exposes the measurement).
  • vmception 4y ago
    Fast doesnt do upload
    • jtc331 4y ago
      It actually does -- you just have to click "Show more info".
    • traceroute66 4y ago
      > Fast doesnt do upload It does but it's hidden, you have to hit "Show more info" (once the main test has finished). A bit stupid, but I'm sure some committee thought it was an awesome idea to do it that way.
      • vmception 4y ago
        Where is this on mobile? I went to fast.com Is it after the speed test is over?
        • traceroute66 4y ago
          > Is it after the speed test is over? Yeah, you have to let it run thorough first, then the button appears. (At least on desktop, I can't remember what it does on mobile)
      • WanderPanda 4y ago
        Makes sense to me. The point is that the speed test traffic pretends to be netflix traffic which is mainly download. The upload to other servers could be limited by the ISP while being unlocked for netflix with low cost (because people don‘t upload a lot towards netflix). So there is less signal in the fast.com upload speed measurement
• tyingq 4y ago
  Try one they probably don't have on their whitelist, like https://proof.ovh.net/ https://proof.ovh.net/
• jl6 4y ago
  > Is there a way I can test this more scientifically? How about the following?: 1. Choose a dozen or so public files on hosts known to have high bandwidth (Google or Microsoft perhaps). Maybe choose a couple of public legal torrents too. 2. Write a script to download all the chosen files (either sequentially or concurrently), and emit timing information. 3. Run that script a couple of times a day at random times. Try to cover weekdays and weekends, days and nights. 4. Repeat 3 but running a speed test first each time. See if there is any statistically significant difference.
  • water-your-self 4y ago
    Just have ping running in the background. You can observe the difference yourself
    • lisper 4y ago
      Ping measures latency, not bandwidth.
    • gerdesj 4y ago
      Ping tests the possibility of connectivity and can provide a hint at latency. That is not a speed test.
    • cortesoft 4y ago
      A lot of network providers treat ICMP traffic differently.
  • zw123456 4y ago
    Yes, I do this as part of my job. I help manage a system that does something like this for a large network operator. We have test phones that run TWAMP, RFC 6349 and iperf (and a few other tests) on a routine schedule to special test servers. generating data which you will never ever see. But you could do something similar if you had the desire. I have yet to see anyone do that yet. All network providers have various throttling systems set up to limit your throughput, that is pretty universal, and, most of such systems are intentionally bypassed based for speed tests. They know the 5 tuples for all the speed test servers and bypass throttling for those test. Yes, speed tests are rigged, think, Volkswagen Diesel, an inside joke pretty widely known in the industry.
• londons_explore 4y ago
  Just run a Cron job to ping speedtest.net every 1 minute. My ISP does the prioritization whenever you do a DNS lookup for speedtest.net. You don't actually need to run the test.
• negative_zero 4y ago
  As other commentets have pointed out: you are not insane :) Another speedtester you can try: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
  • walderf 4y ago
    unfortunately, the sad truth about dslreports, who for years has remained an unbiased provider of a truly accurate speedtest, is that their test no longer functions appropriately in modern browsers. however, due to this, https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat was born. they mention this along with their specific reasons in the FAQ on the linked page. so, update your bookmarks and plan to continue spreading the good word with this new provider in place.
• withinboredom 4y ago
  On Windows, Chrome is limited to one core when it’s in the background and uses all the cores in the foreground. Makes web development incredibly annoying. (This was several years ago, it might have changed and I don’t use windows as much)
• kolanos 4y ago
  Anecdotal, but I consistently get 80mbps on speed.cloudflare.com and 220mbps on fast.com with Spectrum.
• Geonode 4y ago
  Yes, they've been doing this for years.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Unlikely your suspicions are correct. Provisioning high QoS to the speedtest site is common practice (see fast.com for countermeasures), but changing the entire subscriber QoS because traffic to one particular destination is detected seems like too much work and doesn't really achieve anything useful. If you are on a wireless network (either your upstream from a WISP, or internally on your own network), then I'd suspect some wireless air access control syndrome is the cause -- e.g. stations are usually randomly fighting for air, but when you pull down your big speed test file that ends up putting the network in a state where your station gets all the air time. Lo and behold all your traffic has better QoS. Basically your speedtest traffic, because it is a constant stream, shoved everyone else off the air and allowed your other traffic to get through at the same time as a result.
  • bragr 4y ago
    This should be easy to test. Find a a big file somewhere served reasonably fast and see if you can replicate the results while pulling it down. Maybe some Linux distro ISO? I really doubt an ISP would optimize that.
  • semi-extrinsic 4y ago
    > and doesn't really achieve anything useful At my previous apartment, I would get a full month rebate off my internet bill if I could document speeds considerably below average on a computer plugged in with ethernet. I could very well see an ISP with such a policy looking for nefarious ways to "fix" that money loss.
    • KMag 4y ago
      There's that, and also visiting a speed test site is an indicator that a particular user is more sensitive to speed than the general user base (and perhaps considering jumping to another ISP). It absolutely makes business sense to prioritize traffic to users who pay more attention.
      • kortilla 4y ago
        No, as an isp these are the worst customers. It’s better to piss off an dump people who consume a lot of bandwidth an are obsessed with throughput if you’re “business obsessed”.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  Ultimately it’s down to peering. Even without malicious action from your provider, it could just be that their routes to your selected speed test server are free while the routes to your other destination are congested.
• lucb1e 4y ago
  Country, ISP? I never noticed this with any ISP I've used in NL/DE/BE/FI.
• totalview 4y ago
  I used to unfreeze my unresponsive safari and chrome tabs by opening Firefox. Worked most of the time. Any similar explanation or am I nuts?
• bayindirh 4y ago
  I was having a similar problem at home, but it wasn't remedied by anything like that. Then, one day I've installed DNSMasq on a small SBC on my local network, then everything became blazing fast. That day I've found out that my ADSL modem is not very good at making huge amount of DNS queries to outside world, and with a fast DNS resolver, Firefox is actually as fast as Chrome. So, make sure that you can access your DNS servers with the speed they need to be accessed for a good network experience. If you want to test whether this is true, make your own speedtest. Download the same Linux ISO from different mirrors, or try different speedtest mirrors to go further than your ISP.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tommiegannert 4y ago
  I don't trust speedtests. There are all kinds of wrong incentives, similar to GPU benchmarks. One thing I noticed was that the data speedtest.net sends has really low entropy. It just repeats 10 bytes. If I ran an ISP I would... So I wrote chargen2p [1] as an extension to the classical chargen protocol. I use it together with a Prometheus exporter [2] I wrote to periodically check my laptop's connectivity. The actual check runs over Wireguard, since I didn't want to open my chargen2p server to the public. This only checks download speeds, mind you. (The chargen2p library exports upload metrics, but the exporter doesn't use it.) My graphs tell me the average is ~5 MBps, so 40 Mbps. This is between me (Switzerland) and a Hetzner DC in Germany. speedtest.net just now claimed 160 Mbps. [1] https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p [2] https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter
• hkt 4y ago
  Try with LibreSpeed? Hosted version: https://librespeed.org/ https://librespeed.org/ Self hosted version: https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest For those who need to document lower speeds than SLAs from their ISPs, this will help you check for chicanery, shenanigans, and sneaky QoS. Recommend.
• edgyquant 4y ago
  When I lived in the Midwest I had frontier and when I’d complain about speeds they’d send me to their speed test that always reflected my exact data speed (even though the actual internet speeds were 10x slower some times.) Fast.com always had more accurate speeds.
• otterley 4y ago
  If you want more data points, configure your egress traffic to go through various VPNs to see whether you get the same results. It’s easy enough to do from a computer or a supported mobile device, if you’re willing to spend a few bucks trying a few different services out. I believe several of them offer free trials.
• kortex 4y ago
  I was having issues with slow load times, high latency, dropped packets, the works. I had been profiling it and logging my bandwidth with (iirc) iperf on a raspi, over the past 48h. When I felt like I had collected enough data, I called Spectrum to give em a piece of my mind. One of the first things they had me do was use their online speedtest. Came up with 100Mbps...I had been getting 10 on iperf. Suddenly, my traffic quality was mysteriously better. No idea what was actually going on, but the whole thing was a bit sus. I definitely recommend using your own server and profiling tools if you are suspicious of speedtest.
• b20000 4y ago
  related question: spectrum pushes fiber where i am located, but there is no way to bring fiber into our residential unit/building. i guess they mean fiber to a local hub or something, then cable to our unit. isn’t that what they do anyway, and unless you have fiber into the unit, offers no improvement?
• DanAtC 4y ago
  Which ISP? Name and shame
• ComradePhil 4y ago
  Write a script to curl speedtest every minute and have fast internet speed all the time?
• asah 4y ago
  google "speed test" also offers another view... but haha no less biased afaict. speedtest.net: 19ms ping / 288 Mbps down / 72 Mbps up g speed test : 8ms ping / 620 Mbps down / 28 Mbps up
• bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  Well, I've had this experience as well, where I note the performance is so bad that I go to the speed test page of my internet provider and then it ends up being ok. However I have a pretty solid suspicion that they have not done anything to monitor usage and stop throttling when seeing a check because: 1. I used to consult (for two years) in the department of my internet provider that would have had to do the reporting to the people who would have controlled throttling and even worked on the speed test page at times and there was no project to do that. 2. There was evidently no known and talked about throttling project among the hundreds of techies working at the business. 3. This place would not have been able to pull off the coordination between departments required to do this and also keep it a secret, and I'm betting most Internet providers would be even more incapable of doing something so nefarious. 4. The department providing customer support would have had to be in league with whatever department providing throttling, however KPIs for the customer support would of course have been negatively impacted by the many people calling in to report negative bandwidth usage. Thus they would have had to be in league with another division of the company to make sure they underperformed and thus did not get good bonuses etc. That would be an enviable level of dedication I must say.
• peepop6 4y ago
  I observed this as a kid and still experience it these days. Never even questioned whether it was true because it felt so incredibly obvious that the ISP was dethrottling whenever they detected a speed test.
• oneplane 4y ago
  Where are you located? Never had this happen with the ISPs here but perhaps it's common in other countries.
• teddyh 4y ago
  Note: Users in Sweden and northern Europe are probably better served by http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ http://www.bredbandskollen.se/
• cscotti 4y ago
  +1 - noticed the same thing twice last week. But naturally I thought I was just paranoid. Xfinity?
• asdff 4y ago
  Test it out by parallelizing a ton of downloads from a known good server and really overwhelm your connection. I find that it's not my ISP thats doing the throttling, its the content host at the other end. Steam/microsoft/even small third parties all throttle downloads after a while. If it was my ISP, I would see the throttling when I run my tester array on a server that I know for a fact doesn't throttle, but I don't, so its clearly the third party at the other end of the line trying to save money on upload costs. I can't blame them when everything is 4k now.
• tus666 4y ago
  Fascinating if true.
• mfer 4y ago
  Speed tests often test last mile. That’s only part of real world performance. Some examples of other factors to real world stuff: 1. If you internet provider has limited bandwidth when it connects to other parts of the internet. I used to have a problem where my ISP has one connection out of its network. That bandwidth was limited and caused real world issues. 2. TCP can and often does involve multiple round trips. As web pages have grown in size it’s had an impact on performance at the network level Increased bandwidth in the last mile doesn’t solve for these types of issues
  • bombcar 4y ago
    You can often deduce the pipeline sizes from a trace route - if the next step out of your ISP is LA-NYC-1G.carrier.net you’re probably never going to see more than 1G until they upgrade the equipment and leave the name the same.
• MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  I have noticed that speed test seems to run fast when everything else is slow. I haven't seen anything else speed up though. I guess they prioritise traffic to speed test, but unfortunately that doesn't get me a speed up in general.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  I dunno, man. I upgraded my 8 year old router and saw my speeds increase 100 fold on speed test. Thinking this was an aberration, I ran some tests doing software downloads and some DB backup restores that would give me enough testing time to rule out connection start friction or drops, and it was pretty much confirmed.
• cloudking 4y ago
  Biggest improvement I found came from replacing the ISP provided modem/router with my own modem and router. Both improvements in overall speed and latency in gaming. I'm guessing they have less remote access control over third-party modems, and the quality of name brand is generally better. I use a Netgear cable modem and Ubiquiti router gear.
• Havoc 4y ago
  ISPs screwing with speedtest results is quite common and plausible. The claim that it affects other tabs...seems wildly unlikely to me though. QoS and shaping is per service and per target.
• Masoodmustafa 4y ago
• Masoodmustafa 4y ago
• nwpk 4y ago
  [dead]
• russellbeattie 4y ago
  I had this same exact thought, and will open fast.com once in a while to give my AT&T 1Gb fiber at home a kick. But I never assumed malice, even if it is AT&T. I'm not a network engineer but I can see how giving whatever back end networking management system they have a nudge by requesting a fast connection improving things.
• darkhorn 4y ago
  Use DoH. ESNI would help too.
• kloch 4y ago
  iperf is the gold standard for measuring throughput but it requires a shell on both ends. The default TCP mode is fairly intuitive and usually gives a good idea of what is going on. For precise independent tests of up and down speeds you need to use UDP mode with increasing bit rates until you start to see significant packet loss in that direction. Repeat in the other direction. Another consideration is that the endpoint you are testing from (probably some cloud vm or server at work) will likely have different routing to your other endpoint (home) than other sites/services you visit. It is not unusual for eyeball ISP's to sometimes have congested peering with specific networks in specific locations while your work->home path will be clean.
• zw123456 4y ago
  Yes, and, the joke in the industry is that network speed tests are to network performance what the Volkswagen Diesel was to emission tests :). All carriers implement various types of throttling or rate limiting, for a lot of reasons (anti-ddos, cost control, etc.) But; universally, they bypass these rate controls such as Cisco PGW ADC (Application Detection and Control) and LTE eNB ABR for wireless as examples, and many others similar features that limit the rate the user actually gets. And in almost all cases, these systems are designed to allow speed tests to bypass the rate limiting. Commercial Speed tests are in no way a valid or reliable way of understanding the quality of a network service. I am a little surprised that this is breaking news on HN however. I would think this would be pretty well understood by this community? BTW. Fast.com does is not always immune to this "Volkswagen diesel" effect. The only way to know for sure is to have a VM or bare metal server someplace and do an iperf to it.
  • hackernewds 4y ago
    even if it were well understood, it is not common knowledge. if it were common knowledge, it isn't common enough of an annoyance. the last part is definitely not correct. isn't throttling and selective benchmark fakery illegal for the same reasons VW got into trouble? one would assume FTC has a far narrower and well-fanged positioning to punish the perpetrators. what prevents this? (I think monopoly power + no designation as a ultilitt despite being one)
    • zw123456 4y ago
      It's not illegal to make a speedtest that says you got some big value that is BS. It's illegal to put arsenic in a bottle and label it Vitamin C. It's not illegal to call you TV channel "something" news then just make things up. Maybe it should be illegal to call what you are saying is news when it is made up? it used to be (google fairness doctrine) Maybe there should be some regulated valid speed test, but there isn't. there are a lot of things that are legal that are unethical. there are a lot of things that are illegal that are sort of marginally unethical. But, when you elect congress people who are not very technical, probably not going to happen. Just saying. I don't have a good answer for you, just a lot of interestig observations.
• Szpadel 4y ago
  I had the same thing with my previous internet provider, I even set up iperf3 test to confirm that and it was clear when watching anything from youtube. It was so bad that it could barely keep up with 144p on YouTube and when speed test was running i could easily watch anything in 4k, but imidietely when test was finished everything was back to snail speed. I ended up with doing download only speed test in loop from cli version, and even with this extra traffic everything was much faster and with better latencies...
  • zw123456 4y ago
    agree iperf to a server is a good test as long as the 5 tuple is rotated so they dont figure it out.
• gotaquestion 4y ago
  I test my speed by uploading/downloading huge files to my AWS instances. It always matches SpeedTest; I have centurylink fiber, it is >800Mbps up/down. As others have said, if your destination has a slow connection, you're pretty screwed. Not to mention lots of slow file transfers = more latency impact. Transferring 1x1GB file vs 1,000x1MB files is a HUGE difference, the latter will take much longer due to the initialization of the transfer. That's why we used to use FTP to transmit files instead of HTTP way back in the dialup days.
• kuon 4y ago
  You can use iperf, for which many public server exist. https://iperf.fr/iperf-servers.php https://iperf.fr/iperf-servers.php
• RadixDLT 4y ago
  if you are on a macOS, open up the command line and run networkQuality -s
• hnick 4y ago
  My ISP's support told me to always use their local copy (https://speed.aussiebroadband.com.au/ https://speed.aussiebroadband.com.au/) as it avoids routing issues downstream but more importantly, it logs the history onto my account for them to view. The numbers are often higher than what I pay for, but I think they are honest. When I was having connection issues (dialup-tier download speeds, 20 megabit upload) it was reflected accurately. Since I trust them, I like this arrangement. If I didn't then I wouldn't.
  • dunco 4y ago
    I was a TPG refugee who switched to Aussie. TPG had the same setup and it always showed me that I was getting the full speed I payed for, but whenever my traffic went overseas, measured some other way, it would be shockingly slow (like sub 2mbps and with a noticeably bad experience) Every call to TPG was painful and they would just refer me back to their own speedtest.net site and tell me nothing was wrong. switched to Aussie and everything was golden, fast everywhere. You're right that Aussie are uncommonly trustworthy, and the publishing of cvc use publicly is kind of their market prop. Their CEO seems like a legend; like he got the shits with badly behaved ISPs and just made his own or something.
    • hnick 4y ago
      Their support is local and easy to talk to. Easy to go off script with them, and it makes a huge difference in my experience when calling. Unfortunately I've had to call them many times, but that's the reality of HFC NBN I guess - there's nothing they could have done for me apart from build a trail of evidence so NBN actually does something about it. We swapped the NTD and so far so good, I think it was just dying. Aussie is a bit expensive though. It wasn't so bad early on but there are some decent looking competitors now.
• tawhk 4y ago
  I don't know if it's related but some time ago when I was testing the Arch distro, Garuda, I noticed that my Internet was very slow (Kbps) when updating. To test my speed I loaded fast.com and something strange happened, while the test lasted, the update speed was normal (at the top of my Internet plan). Once it finished loading it was slow again. At first glance it seemed that my ISP (Tigo) gave priority to Netflix and released the 'normal' speed when loading the test (fast.com is Netflix's). I made a script that called fast.com every time I updated my OS and it worked super well. I even used the script for other downloads. After switching to Arcolinux I stopped noticing that network behavior and stopped using the script.
• LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  Have you tried using custom DNS (or an alternate provider) to attempt to bypass your ISP? Or run through a DNS (saw another comment saying to try a few different ones). Might just be slow all the time then (if they can't determine when to un-throttle your connection, ha). But at least you'd have something to look at.
• asdz 4y ago
  Aren't this same as benchmark cheating? The ISP shall be banned
• aendruk 4y ago
  The thing I keep getting suspicious about is occasionally network traffic will stop, I begin troubleshooting with a traceroute, and then coincidentally traffic will resume. It feels like the traceroute fixed the problem but it must just be my imagination. Right?
• deltaonefour 4y ago
  Good way to run a business. Run your business and on the side create a speed test on the side and call it the only accurate speed test and explain the business model of other speed tests and how the ISP prioritizes speed tests sites and how your site is the only accurate test around. Then when your speed test gets popular. ISP's will think they're clever and start prioritizing your site! That's when you BOOM! switch servers and point the DNS's to the new servers! Flip the servers running your business to the speed test servers and flip the speed test servers to your business! Be sure to switch it back during off hours. Now you have a SUPER fast business operation and in addition to that a speed test site that is STILL more accurate then other speed test sites.
• Terry_Roll 4y ago
  Some people in the UK may remember this problem at the end of March? https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/british-gas-eon-websites-crash-meter-readings-energy-rise/ https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/british-gas-eon-websites-crash-me... So someone I know couldnt submit their meter reading at various times throughout the 31st of March so I did it for them simply by doing a tracert to the server handling the meter readings in question for Eon. In the time it took for the tracert to complete I was able to log in as them and submit their meter reading! Before the tracert trick, I too was having lots of problems logging in as them trying to submit their meter reading. I did the tracert because I was going to VPN to physically get closer to their server, possible even within the same data centre and as it happens it was located on a globally recognised brands scalable cloud server so there was no reason really for these server to not handle all these meter readings! The cynic in me thinks this was an attempt by some energy firms to consolidate their market positions by messing customers around with higher energy bills which reinforces the adage nice guys finish last, or when looking back over several months, the nice companies go bust! So some IT staff working for Eon will be getting their comeuppance, because they didnt let their servers scale up to meet demand and the so called free british press are extremely quiet on this point, because they dont want to reduce advertising income! There are so many legal ways to be criminal!
• ghshephard 4y ago
  Speedtest is there to verify the PHY - shouldn’t be used for anything else. If you want to test “Internet” speed - use speed.cloudflare.com
• fomine3 4y ago
  It's possible even if ISP don't manage traffic, if you use VPN. After much traffic went by speedtest, TCP window size for VPN connection should become big that helps connection speed.
• bloodguard 4y ago
  Whenever my comcast link gets slow I go to their speed test page and it always tries to tell me I'm getting more than what I'm paying for. Shortly after running the test everything starts to speed up again. Makes me wonder if they have some kind of shady "squeaky wheel" QOS traffic shaping voodoo.
• boot13 4y ago
  I use https://speedof.me/ https://speedof.me/ and https://testmy.net/ https://testmy.net/. They match my QoS limits when QoS is enabled in my router, and match what I'm paying for when QoS is disabled.
• robbedpeter 4y ago
  I have to use my VPN to get any sort of performance. My isp throttles the shit out of everything, but they're usually a couple months behind my VPN provider, and when they catch up I switch. I just want the fucking service I pay for without the doodlefuckery.
• yareth 4y ago
  Yes, that is common. Back when I used to work for an ISP, all of our main competitors have whitelisted speedtest servers to sidestep their shaping and sometimes even ran their own, just to look good on the results page. The fact that other webs instantly load might be just an implementation quirk; the QoS might get reset for a second when loading the speedtest page. You can see what ISP traffic shaping actually does when you have a server on reliable backbone link outside of given ISP network by trying to download or upload large file to it and measuring. Bandwidth changes usually aren't too smooth and often you can see "stairs" on measurement graph as the speed drops the more data you transmit. This shows how the whole "speed UP TO xyz mbits" marketing trick really works.
• shaklee3 4y ago
  can confirm. used to work for an ISP and they game it, and the reason is that everyone else does. you aren't supposed to game the fcc broadband site, though, since they use they as a proxy for internet speeds in the US.
• nomilk 4y ago
  So a shell script or browser extension that periodically curls speedtest sites would enable faster browsing?
• sinuhe69 4y ago
  That’s true. Whenever the internet seems too sluggish, I run fast.com and other internet speed test tool then everything seems significantly faster.
  • Derbasti 4y ago
    Windows does the same thing: the moment you open the Task Manager, the top three items magically throttle themselves.
• sheraely 4y ago
• taubek 4y ago
  So some ISPs are rigging the results like some car manufacturers were cheating on diesel eco tests?
• t3ra 4y ago
  Alongside probably whitelisting : Most speed test sites hit the ISP cache or peered traffic and hence are much faster. you can inspect fast.com and see this in action: It will show up something like "ipv4-c209-sea001-ix.1.oca.nflxvideo.net" Which is their openconnect [1] location in Seattle IX. In many cases you will probably see a prefix indicating your ISP - Most ISPs with some scale host their own caches or peer with an internet exchange directly. Incase of speedtest - its the same story most ISPs host servers locally and speedtest's website generally tests from it Most of my ISP screw ups are involve content which isnt cached and its difficult to convey that when your netflix is able to stream 4K content easily but struggling to download a 100mb file of some AWS region :/ I sometimes use proof.ovh.net and ping.online.net to test using iperf also ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com helps debug if ISP is having issues with connecting to AWS (more open than not thats the case with mine) --- [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com https://openconnect.netflix.com
• ksec 4y ago
  You mentioned Stalled Tabs. I am wondering if you have so many tabs opened the Network detected it as some malicious traffic and starting slowing you down.
• renonce 4y ago
  Top Chinese university here. In China we had to use proxies to access certain foreign sites, such as Google and Hacker News, because of censorship. Proxies were slow but speedtest was fast, so one of the guys tried including "speedtest" as a fake hostname for the proxies. Speed was immediately up to 1Gbps rather than 10Mbps.
• zahma 4y ago
  300mbit symmetrical fiber connection here. Even with a VPN (WireGuard), I can nearly saturate the downlink and uplink with a Speedtest and ~5ms latency. I get similar performance via sftp download from a server located several countries away. Upload speed is not nearly as good, but I can’t say if that’s due to my ISP or the server on the other end. I’ve also seen a lot of Speedtest results for ATT fiber. These allow full gigabit transfers. I do wonder if these results hold up to actual use cases if someone can saturate 1gbit.
• andycjw 4y ago
  this is true, in my country, it's a well known thing that the internet gets un-throttled when accessing speedtest, and someone ingenious made a script to keep running speedtest-cli in background to keep the internet working at full speed https://github.com/orz811017/boost_bandwidth_via_speedtest https://github.com/orz811017/boost_bandwidth_via_speedtest
• vmurthy 4y ago
  For the curious, macOS Monterey includes a cool tool called `networkQuality` that does what you want. It checks the upload/download speed and more. Check out this[0] article or `man networkQuality` from your terminal [0]https://www.macobserver.com/tips/macos-monterey-includes-network-quality-test/ https://www.macobserver.com/tips/macos-monterey-includes-net...
• belter 4y ago
  Did a little bit of data mining on this thread. All Test Pages mentioned so far: ---------------------------------- https://www.speedtest.net/ https://www.speedtest.net/ https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest https://librespeed.org/ https://librespeed.org/ http://134.209.196.181:8080 http://134.209.196.181:8080 https://proof.ovh.net/ https://proof.ovh.net/ https://fast.com/ https://fast.com/ https://speed.aussiebroadband.com.au/ https://speed.aussiebroadband.com.au/ https://www.speedcheck.org/ https://www.speedcheck.org/ https://speedof.me/ https://speedof.me/ https://testmy.net/ https://testmy.net/ Additonal Sites not mentioned yet: ---------------------------------- https://speedtest.xfinity.com/ https://speedtest.xfinity.com/ http://internethealthtest.org/ http://internethealthtest.org/ https://speedsmart.net/ https://speedsmart.net/ Tools: ---------------------------------- https://iperf.fr/iperf-servers.php https://iperf.fr/iperf-servers.php https://github.com/orz811017/boost_bandwidth_via_speedtest https://github.com/orz811017/boost_bandwidth_via_speedtest https://github.com/e7d/speedtest https://github.com/e7d/speedtest https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/ https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/ https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter
  • v37p 4y ago
    My go-to is https://speed.measurementlab.net/ https://speed.measurementlab.net/
• topranks 4y ago
  It would be very expensive for ISPs to implement this kind of thing. So Occam’s Razor makes me doubt it. ISPs do all kinds of tricks to make speed tests work well, co-locating, prioritising that path etc. But I don’t think they’ve complex profiling equipment that slows everything, then removes the slowdown when they see DNS/SNI for speedtest, then apply it again after. Also been working for ISPs for 20+ years and never heard of it. Only exception may be in cellular with their fancy PCRF boxes, but even there I think it’s much more common to throttle one class, and not another, than to slow everything but switch the throttle on/off if you access a particular site. If this is true you could easily game it by running speed test all the time. All you gotta do is throttle bandwidth to the speed test servers yourself somehow (so the speed test goes slow and doesn’t eat your available bandwidth.) Then you’ll be permanently in the “they’re doing speedtest give them full speed” category.
  • exac 4y ago
    This functionality is built into Cisco IOS. Can you tell me what exactly is expensive about implementing it alongside the other configuration?
• Solaerum 4y ago
• Solaerum 4y ago
  Download a steam game and check your speeds...
• petesergeant 4y ago
  Both fast.com and speed.cloudflare.com give better results than speedtest.net, and now I'm concerned my ISP can't even be bothered to game the system.
• GuB-42 4y ago
  I suspect it is a bias effect. Sometimes, connections are slow for a few minutes: temporary network congestion, maintenance, interference, etc... That's the time you start to check, and by coincidence, things get better as you are checking. I don't think that your test triggered anything. What is true however is that speed test servers are often located right next to you and maybe given priority access. It means that you can get great numbers despite a poor global connection, but it shouldn't make anything else go better.
• secondcoming 4y ago
  It seems that fast.com overestimates your connection bandwidth if the tab you're running it on gets put in the background.
• amelius 4y ago
  So much for Net Neutrality ...
• tikiman163 4y ago
  Ah yes, the internet's worst kept secret. The reasons behind it however are less obvious. Yes, to a certain extent your ISP is watching to see if you run a speedtest and will open up more bandwidth to you in the event you do. However, if they were throttling you, which is not guaranteed, the most likely reason for throttling you is that the network hub for your neighborhood was under an heavy load, and they throttled everyone on your backbone hub to ensure that critical operations don't experience interruptions. What you might consider critical operations might not agree with what your ISP considers critical of course, but they're a for profit business rather than a utility. So, what you consider a valid reason for throttling you doesn't count for squat. The reason they sped you up is that despite the fact that they carefully crafted their service contract to say they legally can throttle you for any reason or no reason at all, it reduces the number of complaints calls they don't intend to do anything about. It also gives them plausible deniablity, and weirdly enough a useful metric for identifying hardware problems. They can simply make you think that the problem was the individual web service you were connecting to, or maybe just all of cloud flare. But more than that, they are able to track the number of times in a day that people visited a speedtest site, and whether they were able to get your speed up to the expected level. This functions as an early warning sign that they need to increase the total available bandwidth in an area if those numbers become what your ISP considers unacceptable. Again, what your ISP considers unacceptable and what you consider unacceptable are not the same, but they're a for profit business rather than a regulated non-profit utility.
  • PokestarFan 4y ago
    Seems we should be making internet a utility then. The second things like court meetings or paying the bills for other utilities were happening over the internet is the second internet becomes a utility.
• Ash-k 4y ago
  And I was thinking it was only me. I also noticed one more thing since last year: At times, my internet speed would feel stalled, so I check if my wireless connection is still ok. I open the wifi connection tray from the right hand corner and I notice that only my SSID is displayed. The moment I hover over my SSID, the other neighboring SSIDs and my other SSIDs(2G, 5G ones to which I am not connected to) appear suddenly. And 8 out of 10 times my speed gets a boost and everything starts working properly.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  I find malice difficult to believe. Instead, I wonder if your router or something else on your network stack is a little wonky. Do speeds increase when you reboot your router or cable modem? When you have slow speeds, does another device on the network also suffer slow speeds?
• jhpaul 4y ago
  In my experience, OPs perception is generally correct, though perhaps less conspiratorial and nefarious than a reality of the system in place. Across the many nodes between you and a destination, all sorts of traffic management systems move data around at different priorities. When something gets overloaded, stalled tabs are a visible system of the breakdown. By initiating a large, typically sequential, high-speed transfer in both directions, you give each node an amount of time to recover, naturally move up the queue, and identify yourself as needing more resources. Once the speed test is moving along, everything else is 'along for the ride', to an extent. On a home network, wifi aps are typically the biggest bottleneck, followed by underpowered or overheated routers/gateways. Depending on your isp's tech, there might be a bottleneck at a neighborhood hub, the central servers, their uplink, or more. Anywhere along the way, this could be due to a mix of technical limits, high traffic, wear, negligence, incompetence, or intentional malice. So you can assume your isp (or their isp) is throttling you in numerous ways. While some might be to deprioritize specific traffic or for political means, I think more is negligence, incompetence and under investment. When you identify yourself as someone needing more, or experiencing issues, it's in the isp's interest to silently resolve the issue automatically if possible (unless they think they can exploit it for a profit). This is even more visible with the isp-owned speed tests, as you're naturally communicating to the fastest server available, plus they can shape the traffic and build the test to show you what they want you to see. iPerf tests are a good tool for testing real world speed. As a basic tool, speedtest.net allows you to select from many test servers, often including your isp, a few local competitiors, and a close by university or tech company server. Individual numbers are less useful than a comparison between numerous tests and destinations. A VM of smokeping or smokeping-speedtest is useful tool for monitoring these sorts of things as you can go back and look at what drops out when to get a feel conditions across the internet.
• sprokolopolis 4y ago
  This has been happening to me for a long time. I have an alias set up in my terminal that will send a ping to speedtest.net every few seconds to make my ISP think that I am doing a speedtest. I will start it if I am noticing throttling. It seems to work some of the time, but not if the network is extremely overloaded. Something like this: alias pingspeed="ping -i 4 speedtest.net"
• todd8 4y ago
  I've been using the networkQuality command on MacOS (a command line tool). It has a few interesting options so see its man page.
• jzer0cool 4y ago
  I believe it's because of burst technology and other QoS. It helps to have a burst of data ready for queue, but will throttle down over a sustained time. I believe this also helps overall network so that you do not continue sending in repeated same, say, from requested again over and over when the internet is slow / does not work adding to congestion.
• JohnnyRevel 4y ago
  That's true! Whenever I got test the speed of my internet, my WIFI goes up to 100mbps, but when I watch videos and stream on YT, it buffers a lot of times. Maybe because my router's kinda old? I'm not so sure tho.
• levifig 4y ago
  No need for tinfoil hats. This is a very basic networking consideration: peering. I've worked at ISPs and we would see traffic struggle through some of our contracted peers but not others all the time. It would take a while for all routes to update, and that if we had rerouting setup properly (not always the case). It gets extra complicated when you add BGP to the mix. Long story short, most ISPs run or are well peered to data centers nearby, which is where speed tests are normally hosted at. For traffic outside of those hops, peering issues can lead to a multitude of issues... and you don't have to be evil for that to happen. No ISPs control the entire IP path between the client and server (with extremely narrow coincidental exceptions).