6 ms·

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

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 5y ago
Edit: removed due to downvoting. Original comment pointed out that transfer speed is normally measured in Mbps not MB/s.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Can't get 100 Megabits on a 10 Megabit line was the point.
- Diesel555 5y 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 5y 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.
CraigJPerry 5y ago
Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when connected to an in-country vpn endpoint. Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping? Better routes. Most latency on the internet is not due to c.
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    C being speed of light
  - hkt 5y ago
    Classic story where this is related: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html tl;dr timeout was sufficiently low and user sufficiently skilled to work out his emails could be delivered only within 500 miles
    - edwinbalani 5y ago
      My favourite aspect of this story is how the academics, being academics, took it upon themselves to characterise the problem in detail before telling the postmaster about it. Could just as easily have said "huh, that's weird" and thrown it at them on day one.
      - hkt 5y ago
        And their explanation was probably more baffling to the admin than a simple "it is broken" report too. It would definitely have been for me.
  - fy20 5y ago
    I get this same with AWS. The routes to my country in Northern Europe from us-* are terrible (eu-* is fine), to the point where a download from S3 during peak times can be tens of kB/s. If I connect to a VPN in another country it jumps to tens of MB/s.
tashbarg 5y ago
Some providers provide speedtests that test (only) last-mile speed between, e.g., cable modem and head unit. Mine does that and reports 1Gb/s just fine. Of course, only to the head unit, nowhere else in the universe.
mlyle 5y ago
> Do not trust them for accurate results. Ookla speedtest properly transfers data and divides to find throughput-- both with the website, the GUI app, and their CLI program. The open source speedtest-cli that uses their infrastructure is hampered by only one connection and can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. Fast.com is ... a little optimistic about transients getting transfers started and sometimes reports numbers 5-10% too high. Neither is grossly wrong by an order of magnitude. Maybe there was also wifi around and simultaneously connected, confounding the situation? Easy to end up in a situation where all your internet traffic is going over wifi (because e.g. your dhcp client replaces the default route with one going over the wifi interface), and all your local traffic goes over ethernet.
- _jsnk 5y ago
  > speedtest-cli ... can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. I routinely get 700-900Mbps reported using speedtest-cli from centurylink fiber. My bottleneck is the CPU on my router running openwrt.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    Can you look at this, and tell me which of the 2 you're using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31063868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31063868 From speedtest's official cli program, on my 2.5gbase-t connected machine I get 2200mbps up and down.. but from the open source speedtest-cli I get 300-350mbps. (Here, I only got ~900mbps because I was running from a raspberry pi with a 1000BaseT link).
- mmastrac 5y ago
  I'm seeing gigabit(-ish) via speedtest-cli: Speedtest by Ookla Server: TELUS Mobility - Calgary, AB (id = 17555) ISP: TELUS Latency: 0.50 ms (0.12 ms jitter) Download: 938.58 Mbps (data used: 422.8 MB) Upload: 919.90 Mbps (data used: 959.8 MB) Packet Loss: Not available. FTTH, Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch -> UniFi Dream Machine Pro SE via 10G link -> Nokia ONT. I _do_ get limited to around 300mbps if my Mikrotik is in the mix and using CPU for routing. Yeah, my home network is overkill but it's a cheaper hobby than other ones might be, hah.
naoqj 5y ago
speedtest.net has a CLI version that is much more reliable than the web version.

cj 5y ago

Edit: removed due to downvoting. Original comment pointed out that transfer speed is normally measured in Mbps not MB/s.

djbusby 5y ago
Can't get 100 Megabits on a 10 Megabit line was the point.
Diesel555 5y 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 5y 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.

CraigJPerry 5y ago

Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when connected to an in-country vpn endpoint. Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?

formerly_proven 5y ago
> I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping? Better routes. Most latency on the internet is not due to c.
- lillecarl 5y ago
  C being speed of light
- hkt 5y ago
  Classic story where this is related: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html tl;dr timeout was sufficiently low and user sufficiently skilled to work out his emails could be delivered only within 500 miles
  - edwinbalani 5y ago
    My favourite aspect of this story is how the academics, being academics, took it upon themselves to characterise the problem in detail before telling the postmaster about it. Could just as easily have said "huh, that's weird" and thrown it at them on day one.
    - hkt 5y ago
      And their explanation was probably more baffling to the admin than a simple "it is broken" report too. It would definitely have been for me.
- fy20 5y ago
  I get this same with AWS. The routes to my country in Northern Europe from us-* are terrible (eu-* is fine), to the point where a download from S3 during peak times can be tens of kB/s. If I connect to a VPN in another country it jumps to tens of MB/s.

tashbarg 5y ago

Some providers provide speedtests that test (only) last-mile speed between, e.g., cable modem and head unit. Mine does that and reports 1Gb/s just fine. Of course, only to the head unit, nowhere else in the universe.

mlyle 5y ago

> Do not trust them for accurate results. Ookla speedtest properly transfers data and divides to find throughput-- both with the website, the GUI app, and their CLI program. The open source speedtest-cli that uses their infrastructure is hampered by only one connection and can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. Fast.com is ... a little optimistic about transients getting transfers started and sometimes reports numbers 5-10% too high. Neither is grossly wrong by an order of magnitude. Maybe there was also wifi around and simultaneously connected, confounding the situation? Easy to end up in a situation where all your internet traffic is going over wifi (because e.g. your dhcp client replaces the default route with one going over the wifi interface), and all your local traffic goes over ethernet.

_jsnk 5y ago
> speedtest-cli ... can't seem to ever report higher than 300mbps. I routinely get 700-900Mbps reported using speedtest-cli from centurylink fiber. My bottleneck is the CPU on my router running openwrt.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Can you look at this, and tell me which of the 2 you're using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31063868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31063868 From speedtest's official cli program, on my 2.5gbase-t connected machine I get 2200mbps up and down.. but from the open source speedtest-cli I get 300-350mbps. (Here, I only got ~900mbps because I was running from a raspberry pi with a 1000BaseT link).
mmastrac 5y ago
I'm seeing gigabit(-ish) via speedtest-cli: Speedtest by Ookla Server: TELUS Mobility - Calgary, AB (id = 17555) ISP: TELUS Latency: 0.50 ms (0.12 ms jitter) Download: 938.58 Mbps (data used: 422.8 MB) Upload: 919.90 Mbps (data used: 959.8 MB) Packet Loss: Not available. FTTH, Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch -> UniFi Dream Machine Pro SE via 10G link -> Nokia ONT. I _do_ get limited to around 300mbps if my Mikrotik is in the mix and using CPU for routing. Yeah, my home network is overkill but it's a cheaper hobby than other ones might be, hah.

naoqj 5y ago

speedtest.net has a CLI version that is much more reliable than the web version.