32 ms·

Speed Test

664 points by RadixDLT 3y ago

dtaht 3y ago
For detailed bufferbloat related statistics, I helped create the flent.org tool, many years ago. It shows details that the web tests cannot. I keep hoping more folk will see networks with single digit latency under load stats, like what we get from a good cake or fq_codel installation at the CPE, or with libreqos.io, preseem, etc at the ISP.
chewmieser 3y ago
Looks great! Didn’t realize there was much more that could be improved upon vs the alternatives but I think I’ll use this again next time. A dedicated domain would be nice. I probably wouldn’t recommend this to people like fast.com though due to the more complex interface, but I love it!
- cybrox 3y ago
  I actually really like the interface. You have the "generic" speed test information at the top and a lot more additional information at the bottom. It feels a bit overwhelming at first, though, granted.
- superhumanuser 3y ago
  I'm a fan on https://fast.com https://fast.com Minimal interface. More details behind a toggle if you need them.
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
  I love that it shows you the 90th percentile
eviks 3y ago
No way to use bytes instead of bits in the output?
- cpfohl 3y ago
  Not how it’s usually measured…link speed is pretty much always in bits/s
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    I don't measure file size in bits. I don't want to multiply/divide by 8 when roughly estimating how long a download will take. I end up doing 10 instead for maximum ease and pessimism.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      At least it’s no longer in baud.
    - cpfohl 3y ago
      Link speed has always been measured in bits/s or as sibling comment suggests baud which is, still, just bits per second. Obviously a huge part of this is marketing for modems, ISPs, network cards, etc. but it’s consistent. The conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS… I agree with you that the difference is irritating, but wouldn’t have done any different if I were Cloudflare.
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        > baud which is, still, just bits per second. Isn't the baud-rate the number of signal transitions per second? How that maps to bits per second depends on the wire encoding.
        cpfohl 3y ago
        This is probably more accurate! I was relying on fuzzy memories from an era long past! Thanks for the correction.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        > The conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS… Or the dedicated button on my keyboard that spawns a calculator. I don't care, though.
sorenjan 3y ago
I have a 250 Mb/s connection, but this claims I have over 440 Mb/s download speed. When looking closer at the details I get 250 Mb/s on all tests except the 1 MB download, so it's probably because of some compression or caching or similar, but I don't get the point of the larger tests if they don't affect the final score. I have never downloaded anything faster than 250 Mb/s before, so this is not a good reflection of my actual internet speed.
- oneshtein 3y ago
  Provider turned on "burst mode" for your link, for better customer experience.
- jonathanlydall 3y ago
  I suspect that your line has a configured limit as opposed to physical limit of 250mb/s (perhaps the fibre equipment is capable of 500mb/s or something). I've seen this ever since I moved to fibre about 8 years ago, I've never taken the fastest packages and whenever I test on speedtest.net it always starts off exceeding my limit, then comes down to my limit over a short while. The limiter for you may very well allow you to burst for a limited duration, so your speed on 1MB files are possibly at 440mb/s, but once you have sustained line usage it brings you down to your limit. I wouldn't know if this is an intentional feature or just because of how the limiter solution is implemented that it needs to sample over a certain period of time. It is a slightly useful behaviour if you're browsing the web and only occasionally clicking links which land up being downloaded way faster than your normal limit, but as you're only getting this speed if you do little to nothing for the 10s or 100s of seconds between opening pages, it doesn't have any negative effects over all.
  - jnsaff2 3y ago
    I have seen similar shaping. This gives a quick responsive browsing experience but throttles bigger downloads/streaming. It also can be implemented badly. Azure VNET peering had 200M level and 100M level. Where 200M level was 200M most of the time, whereas 100M level was 200M for 30s and 0M for the next 30s.
  - 3y ago
edent 3y ago
Tried on several devices - it consistently under-reads. I'm on 500Mbps broadband. Ookla and fast.com show 350Mbps via WiFi. Cloudflare only 274Mbps. Similar results on Ethernet. Over 400Mbps on a proper speed test. Can't hit 300 on this. I assume their downstream is capped?
- yakubin 3y ago
  Ookla traffic is known to be prioritised by ISPs. Maybe ISPs just haven’t caught up with Cloudflare yet and what you’re seeing now is more realistic speeds.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  There's an alternative explanation is that it's possible your ISP hasn't learned to prioritise this speed test traffic unlike other speed tests, and that this is more reflective of general real-world performance?
- johneth 3y ago
  I've read that often ISPs make exceptions for Ookla and fast.com speed tests by removing any sort of throttling to produce the best possible test results. I expect it isn't as easy for ISPs to treat Cloudflare like this, as it just looks like normal internet traffic.
  - maccard 3y ago
    Got a source for ISPs doing that for fast.com? Fast.com is netflix, so the same argument applies there - if you get 300mbps on fast.com you should get it on netflix too
    - xnorswap 3y ago
      Indeed, that's part of what motivated netflix to make fast.com.
      - albert_e 3y ago
tebbers 3y ago
Pretty much bang on for me. 202 down, 195 up where my ISP has sold me 200Mbps symmetric. CommunityFibre in London, UK.
im_lince 3y ago
[flagged]
haunter 3y ago
Pretty much spot on for me. 2gig/1gig fiber internet and I got 1.95 Gbps/960 Mbps
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  Wow that’s fast. Genuine question: what’s it like having internet that fast? Because I get 40-50Mbps down and ~16 Mbps down on that tool, and I have fibre to the property (yay, Australia) and I’m so curious to know what’s it like to have a connection that’s actually good.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I’ve ridden a 10g connection to the Internet and the main difference is that big downloads/uploads are near instant. For regular browsing it’s not that noticeable unless it’s also super low latency.
  - dist-epoch 3y ago
    I have 500 Mpbs, and the only noticeable difference versus a connection like yours is that you can download a Ubuntu ISO or a 1080p movie 1-2 minute. That's about it.
pseudo_meta 3y ago
btw, on macOS, you can just enter `networkQuality` into your terminal for a speed test. No third-party website or tool of any kind needed, it's a built-in mac CLI.
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Who's it measuring against? An (internet) speed test by its nature requires some remote third-party, if you aren't just testing to your own server
  - kimburgess 3y ago
    Default is Apple’s infra, but you can choose via a config flag. You can also run your own: https://github.com/network-quality/server https://github.com/network-quality/server
  - sgt 3y ago
    They seem to have edge servers around the world. Even here in South Africa, I got idle latency to be 27ms so it must be somewhere in the country. This is from running networkQuality on a MacBook Pro.
  - tantalor 3y ago
    In the case of tool built by Apple, running on Apple client hardware, against Apple remote server, that would be "1st party", not "3rd party".
    - illiac786 3y ago
      Apple traffic is also heavily prioritised nowadays. They want to avoid huge updates having to be redownloaded I expect. Apple TV would be another reason.
    - IntelMiner 3y ago
      Apple is a 3rd party to yourself
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gumballindie 3y ago
305 Mbps for me. Cringy how slow internet connetivity is in the UK.
- maleldil 3y ago
  Are you in London? My 1Gbps link gives 800-900Mbps in these speed tests, and I'm fine with that. It's a pitty that some of that is unused because I need to use a VPN. When I lived in a small town, my 500Mbps would give me >400Mbps consistently.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    MK area. I wish we had gigabit speeds available.
    - jonatron 3y ago
      Googling says there's CityFibre and Giganet in the MK area. Did they skip your house? A fibre company skipped my street in London.
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        Never heard of the two frankly. Thanks for sharing.
  - secondcoming 3y ago
    That 800-900Mbps doesn't include the bits needed for IP packet headers, does it?
    - maleldil 3y ago
      I'm not sure. All I can say is that speedtest.net and fast.com both show 800/ 900 Mbps for download/upload.
- shmde 3y ago
  I remember me and my brother getting excited when torrent speeds used to touch 200 kbps. Good days.
jnsaff2 3y ago
Uff. Apparently gives correct readings mostly in Chrome only. I have a 500/500M connection and on the same computer Chrome gives 465/364 and Firefox has 311/303M. EDIT: this was on Linux/intel. On Mac M1Pro it Chrome/FF/Safari all get pretty much the same numbers. Both computers have wired ethernet.
- dtaht 3y ago
  I have tried to produce bufferbloat-related tools that measure things far more accurately and in more detail. https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/flaws_in_flent/ https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/flaws_in_flent/
- moffkalast 3y ago
  I've ran it multiple times in Chrome only and got vastly different results just there, from 200 to 600 down on a 500 connection. Must be heavily dependant on moment-to-moment network conditions I guess, to the point where it's nigh useless.
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    Yes, the bandwidth test is so short that I'm not surprised it gets inconsistent results. I'd wager the speedtest.net being longer was not decided for fun, but to get more consistent results. edit: Now I realize that the later tiny-small-medium filesize downloads also add to your above-the-fold download performance, so the results of the initial warm-up test are discarded later.
    - dtaht 3y ago
      In general, none of the web based tests run for long enough. Some are configurable to run longer.
- dsissitka 3y ago
  Did you end up on the same server every time? The Atlanta server seems to be OK at the moment. https://i.imgur.com/SnA9rfH.png https://i.imgur.com/SnA9rfH.png
natrys 3y ago
Where I am, ISPs have arrangements to give intra-country traffic higher speed than inter-country. The nearest cloudflare PoP this chooses is always inside the country, so it gives misleading result.
- notRobot 3y ago
  This is why it's important to consult multiple speed tests, because it's not really a general "internet speed test", rather a "connection speed test" with a particular server.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I recently switched ISPs and went from something like 100mbs to 500mbs but because of how the new ISP peers some sites are actually slower now. Though the main ones I use now I can upload at 1000mbs so not going to complain too loud.
junon 3y ago
There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data in this elevator right now. EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Are you on local 5G? I’ve seen numbers like that. And they often put things in the elevator shafts to prevent dropout.
  - bob1029 3y ago
    Might be this building: https://stelladoradus.com/case-study/mobile-signal-solution-in-an-elevator/ https://stelladoradus.com/case-study/mobile-signal-solution-...
- johnsonjo 3y ago
  Do you have 5G by chance? Have never really looked up 5G speeds until now, so I personally was suprised by what I found, but apparently the speeds can often be anywhere from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, so anywhere in that ballpark or possibly lower could be true. > The theoretical maximum speeds of 5G are pretty groundbreaking — but we have a very long way to go before you’re likely to hit that kind of peak speed in the real world, regardless of your connected device. Depending on your 5G coverage, maximum download speeds *often* range from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, and latency, or the time it takes to send data, could go as low as 1 millisecond (ms). [1] [1]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-fast-is-5g/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-fast-is-5g/
- gargablegar 3y ago
  Fast.com uses local Netflix instances for the data so if you near to one yea you can get high speeds. Also 5G might be in the building with you #tinfoilhat
- DrFlipper 3y ago
  I've been trouble shooting a dodgy 5G connection the last month or so and have entirely abandoned fast.com now. It seems susceptible to wildly inaccurate results when the connection is "bursty", the way 5G can be. I've got some very impressive screenshots from it though, next time anyone wants a measuring contest.
askvictor 3y ago
You also probably need some internal/LAN speed measurement tools. When your wifi link is over-crowded, measuring your uplink isn't much use. I use iperf3.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Many hosting/VPS providers run iperf3 servers you can hit, which can be useful. Why, here’s some now! https://github.com/R0GGER/public-iperf3-servers https://github.com/R0GGER/public-iperf3-servers
gorgoiler 3y ago
Why do these speed tests start out slow and then get faster over the course of a few seconds? Is it something about the internet that means the speed changes so much over the course of the test?
- Severian 3y ago
  It's a inherit effect of TCP congestion control. TCP slow start and Window Scaling.
- dgb23 3y ago
  I can't answer your question directly, because I don't know. But the first keyword I would look at would be BGP. Generally speaking, routing decisions are dynamic and constantly changing. Add the unreliability of the network layer, corporate politics and optimization heuristics to that and you get varying results. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-is-bgp/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
  - bdavbdav 3y ago
    BGP / routing is likely to be static during the course of a test (and indeed much longer)
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    Definitely nothing to do with BGP.
- raphaelj 3y ago
  That's how TCP works. TCP initially starts with a small transmission buffer (the congestion window), and gradually increases its size until it starts getting errors (packet drops or reordering).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
jerrygenser 3y ago
I clicked the about link in the top right. I was pleasantly surprised that it was quite a good advertisement for cloudflare workers.
haivri 3y ago
Wow, the level of detail exposed here is the best I've seen, super useful.
sva_ 3y ago
Very cool site, wish there was a dark mode.
bmo-at 3y ago
Is there a cli tool for this aswell or just the website? At home I have my server run a speedtest (ookla for now) running every 30 minutes because I do not trust my ISP to keep their end of the deal. I visualize the results with grafana and would love to change over to this. As haivri points out, this is a very detailed report! EDIT: Apparently there is a nodejs module available https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest Totally gonna start this project asap
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- darknavi 3y ago
  I do this, although I have a little bit more trust in my fiber ISP. More just curious. I also wonder how much bandwidth I am using by running all of these tests, but my ISP doesn't have any caps so I guess it doesn't matter.
- beyonddream 3y ago
  amazing to see this JS library uses minimal direct dependencies and even a separate devDependencies that are not needed for runtime - https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest/blob/main/package.json#L45C1-L49C5 https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest/blob/main/package.js...
- illiac786 3y ago
  Do you know samknows? Does that for you.
auselen 3y ago
No share/record/export/save button?
- bmo-at 3y ago
  There is a csv export and sharing to twitter and facebook for me, right nect to pause/retest
sebzim4500 3y ago
Smart. With a bit of SEO/marketing, this will become the way consumers judge their internet quality. If connection quality = ping to cloudflare then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating position for peering agreements etc.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  There are decent alternatives for this. Fast.com is hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling. Google has a speedtest as well (Google "speed test" and it'll show a button). The more of these tests start appearing, the better.
  - vijaykodam 3y ago
    Google partners with Measurement Lab (M-Lab) to run this test.
    - Thoreandan 3y ago
      I liked the detailed output of the M-LAB tests, unfortunately the amount of data has fallen over time. They'd also check for traffic shaping / blocking once upon a time. I think the project lasted only as long as the grad students who wrote it were there.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    > hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling That's exactly what the person above you meant about Cloudflare, right? By using the Netflix speedtest as a benchmark, you're promoting good connectivity to another commercial entity (for good or for bad, I don't mean to judge, just stating)
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that ISPs will intentionally throttle. Reduce the bandwidth for all Netflix servers to 5mbps and suddenly you're stuck watching at 480p or 720p, even if the connection can handle multiple 4k streams. This is abused for "unlimited data" subscriptions that aren't unlimited when you actually try to consume more data than a standard subscription would allow you to. Of course that's completely illegal in countries with net neutrality laws, but not every country has those. I can't think of a reason why a shitty ISP would throttle Cloudflare, as Cloudflare mostly hosts small files. As an ISP you want customers to think websites are nice and fast, because if only Netflix is slow, surely the problem lies with Netflix, right? If speedtest.net says you have gigabit, Cloudflare says the same, and fast.com is giving you 5mbps, your ISP is messing with your bandwidth. It could be that Netflix has technical issues, but you'd read about those. That's why these tests are useful, and why we need more like them.
jgrahamc 3y ago
If you're interested in this then you might be interested in the global Internet quality data we are publishing: https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality and https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-radar-internet-quality-page/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-radar-internet-quali...
- akino_germany 3y ago
  Your layout is broken in everything but Chrome.
  - jgrahamc 3y ago
    I do not see an issue with Firefox or Safari on my machine. Feel free to email me (jgc@cloudflare.com) with what you are seeing.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    Works for me in Firefox. Plugins maybe?
    - akino_germany 3y ago
      Yes, the add-on to disable Google Analytics https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout was the problem. Never had that break a web page before.
  - tiagod 3y ago
    It should be working now. This was an interaction between React's streaming hydration errors (due to unexpected HTML injected by extensions) and one of the frontend dependencies.
rishishah20 3y ago
It's Awesome, giving almost right result
Giorgi 3y ago
how to change server? default one is too close, I need to test oversea connection
Pxtl 3y ago
It's very cool, but I thing the initial download-speed test is very misleading. Consistently I get like 2/3 of my max, but then when I let it run to completion and it goes through the longer download tests it ramps up to my full speed and I get the full value.
- dboreham 3y ago
  Um. That's how TCP works.
secondcoming 3y ago
Maybe it's because I'm using 5G as my home broadband, but it seems massively off when compared to Google's SpeedTest and SpeedTest.net
mstade 3y ago
I tried this on my home wifi (fiber backend) and got scores in range with what I expect. Then I tried it again outside the house, a block away using a 5G connection and much to my surprise the bandwidth in downloading was MUCH better (almost 3x) and upload somewhat better (1.5x). The 5G connection had worse latency characteristics though, which is to be expected of course. Obviously this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but I mention it because I'm genuinely surprised that 5G works this well. I've read all the claims but this is the first time I measure it, and frankly if I didn't need lower latency I might've just considered ditching the fiber.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  LTE was like this for a year or two also, in the areas that got it deployed first before handsets using it were widely available. It was several times faster than wired consumer internet at the time, though I also remember the latency not being great. Then within a product cycle or two everyone's phones had it and it went back to normal. I'd expect a similar thing here enjoy it while it lasts I guess.
grumpy_coder 3y ago
Would be nice to aggregate some of these together. One 'speed' has always been a bad proxy for all the different speeds you get from ISP local caches (that most companies can't get in), local COLO/CDN, regional AWS/Azure/etc... and us-east
madeofpalk 3y ago
Great, one more speedtest site to pit against all the others. On my gigabyte fibre: Cloudflare: 697 down / 645 up fast.com: 860 down / 440 up Google: 760 down / 347 up Ookla speedtest: 841 down / 827 up Quite a large variability in upload speeds, which isn't all the surprising I guess. Network providers often don't really need to prioritise upload traffic...
- trvz 3y ago
  > On my gigabyte fibre: *gigabit Get it right already.
  - Aissen 3y ago
    I have a gigabyte fiber connection @ home (Technically 10G EPON which has an effective top speed of 8Gb), so there's no way of knowing if it was a mistake or not. (you're probably downvoted because of the dismissive tone though)
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    I misspoke, but you understood what I meant so no harm was done.
- waynesonfire 3y ago
  cloudflare: 863 down / 57 / up ookla speedtest: 940 up / 750 down
remram 3y ago
Supports IPv6 too. That's a nice surprise.
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  We've been massive advocates of IPv6 since at least 2012: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-challenge-to-the-web/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-challenge-to-the-web/
badrequest 3y ago
I ran the test from Austin, and it showed the test server as located at the Dallas Airport. I wonder how they decided on which landmarks to represent each data center.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  Cloudflare represents each datacenter by the nearest airport code, even though it's not literally at the airport. https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/gathering-information-for-troubleshooting-sites/#identify-the-cloudflare-data-center-serving-your-request https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ge...
NelsonMinar 3y ago
The interesting thing about this to me is its repeated sampling and reporting of a statistical profile of the link. Showing distributions for latency and speed, not just a single average. Really helpful info on less-consistent connections like Starlink. Example screenshot here: https://postimg.cc/bDTyy8BM https://postimg.cc/bDTyy8BM
- tomsmeding 3y ago
  That website is not zoomable on mobile, which is a pretty grave offence for an _image posting site_.
  - NelsonMinar 3y ago
    ugh you're right. I'm on the lookout for an imgur replacement, do you have a recommendation?
    - RunningDroid 3y ago
      Minimal file hosts like https://catbox.moe https://catbox.moe or http://0x0.st http://0x0.st work nice in my opinion, here's an example link: https://files.catbox.moe/zamm2d.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/zamm2d.jpg The only catch is most of them set a time limit on uploads, but you might be able to (ab)use archive.org if you want the files to stay online forever.
6bb32646d83d 3y ago
Upload results are off for me. I have a 1gbps down/up fiber. With this speed test, the results are 900mbps down, 400-500mbps up (ran a few tests to confirm) I tried running fast.com, speedtest.net, google speed test and verizon speed test (I'm on AT&T), they all show ~950mbps down and up
xyzelement 3y ago
I recently discovered the networkquality tool on Mac. As far as I can tell it's the only tool that measures simultaneous upload and download speeds which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases. I was using it to see if my new hardcore gaming router gave me better range than the old one. On isolated up and down tests, it did. But on combined tests, the advantage especially for upload disappeared.
- CrLf 3y ago
  > which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases What's more reflective of real world use cases is a hot discussion topic. :) The "networkQuality" tool on macOS and other implementations(1) of the "RPM" algorithm(2) are very good to see how an Internet connection behaves under high stress. But the real world is seldom high stress (100Mbps+ connections are rarely pushed to the limit, honestly). In your example, video conferencing indeed does simulataneous upload and download, but it's also low bandwidth (relatively speaking) and doesn't usually come close to saturating a connection. It can impacted by other traffic in the same connection though. Which can come from a single user, or multiple users sharing the same connection. And neither networkQuality nor Cloudflare's speed test measure how a connection behaves with multiple users stressing a connection. In the end, which tool you use depends on what you're trying to measure. For me, the Cloudflare speed test is closer to measuring what I experience in real world use. (1) https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness (2) https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiveness-00.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiv...
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Yes fair enough. I know my link is great - I pay for 300 up and down and that's what I get. I was running measurements to track degradation in wifi performance due to distance from the router - out in the yard - and how much difference one of these 8 antenna monster routers made. My use case is 100 video conferencing that I want to do reliability from the yard.
awslattery 3y ago
This has been my go-to over Fast.com for years. The breakdown of latencies and speeds at different thresholds was very beneficial in validating the behavior of our 5G Home Internet through Verizon.
itvision 3y ago
I use fast.com instead. This one tests a 10MB chunk at last and that's the only reliable indication for me. 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping).
- CrLf 3y ago
  > 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping). That's related to TCP congestion control. TCP starts slow and ramps up speed as download progresses. But you're right that latency also has an impact on smaller downloads, and that's why latency is a critical measurement of connection quality for everyone, not just gamers.
uncertainrhymes 3y ago
The level of detail is very nice, I wish more tools exposed this as easily. That said, please remember this is a test of you through your ISP to a (hopefully) nearby Cloudflare node. It isn't necessarily testing 'the Internet', since Cloudflare sometimes has creative peering relationships to origins that are not being measured here. Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate.
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
- capableweb 3y ago
  > unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth Well, having a good network card and frequently downloading large files (which I'm guessing lots of people do here, especially those in ML/AI and related fields), I'm not sure why the downloads wouldn't go faster if you didn't have more bandwidth... People use the internet for more than just watching movies you know.
  - Arelius 3y ago
    Yeah, for sure, I'm often syncing multi gigabyte repositories while me and my wife are on video conferences. You really feel the extra bandwidth then.
- nrb 3y ago
  > Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate. Haven’t downloaded any 150+ GB games (or patches even these days) off of Steam lately I see
  - sushisource 3y ago
    Yeah. Comcast is shorting me by a solid 50Mb/s and this is the reason it's annoying. On top of the fact that their garbage excuse for a website is literally completely broken. Every time I've tried to use it for the past year it just sticks me in a login loop. What a truly miserable company.
aidenn0 3y ago
The upload speed numbers are highly suspect. I have cable that shows 32Mbps on every test I've ever run and yet CF is showing an absurd 221Mbps [edit] I saw the more detailed information below. The high speed comes entirely from 2 outliers on the 1MB upload test; all of the 10MB tests were clustered around 32Mbps [edit2] I reran and got similar results again with 3 1MB uploads over 200Mbps and all other uploads clustered around 32Mbps
reboot81 3y ago
Seems like a great alternative to blip. https://github.com/apenwarr/blip https://github.com/apenwarr/blip
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Anything new here?
teddyh 3y ago
Users in Sweden should use <https://www.bredbandskollen.se/ https://www.bredbandskollen.se/>.
p1mrx 3y ago
Nice. Every speed test should have a "latency under load" graph, because we can't fight bufferbloat if we can't see it. DSLReports had the first bufferbloat test I'm aware of, but it's broken now. Another example is https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat Ideally this problem should be fixed by ISPs and modem manufacturers, but individuals can use OpenWrt with luci-app-sqm, at least when the connection has a predictable speed limit. An option to choose between IPv4/IPv6 (or test both) would probably be useful.
- sinak 3y ago
  Ah the Waveform test is ours! I've been meaning to post it properly to HN since we launched it. It's far from being a perfect bufferbloat/latency under load test, and there's lots of room to improve it, but we built it when DSL Reports seemed to be running a little unreliably. We actually use Cloudflare and Fastly on the backend for latency/speed testing. We built and host the test for free mostly because I wanted it, but I justified the dev time as it being very-roundabout marketing for us - so if you ever need a signal booster or MIMO antenna for 5G internet, looks us up :).
  - dtaht 3y ago
    In some cases, the upload portion of the waveform test appears to be broken, btw. I worry that underneath it has switched from cubic to BBR and is thus understanding what a normal user actually experiences. Otherwise I still feel yours is the best web based latency under load test out there! Thank you for creating it and keeping it going so long! (Can I have you add preseem, libreqos, etc, to the FAQ?)
  - trendal 3y ago
    Hey, I love that tool. Use it all the time at our Wisp installs. And it's easy to point clients to it and have them send me the results. If you need donations to keep it going please reach out.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago
jedisct1 3y ago
What are speed tests that work from the command line?
- uncertainrhymes 3y ago
  If you have easy access to an arbitrarily large file (or an online random file generator) curl has timing variables that can be exposed via the -w flag. e.g. Create a format file named curltime.txt containing: time_namelookup: %{time_namelookup}s\n time_connect: %{time_connect}s\n time_redirect: %{time_redirect}s\n time_starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}s\n ----------\n time_total: %{time_total}s\n then curl -svo /dev/null -w "@curltime.txt" https://example.com/my_arbitrary_file https://example.com/my_arbitrary_file Would result in something like: time_namelookup: 0.048205s time_connect: 0.079001s time_redirect: 0.000000s time_starttransfer: 0.377603s ---------- time_total: 0.412150s
  - jedisct1 3y ago
    That doesn't provide any information about jitter, latency, packet loss, DNS, location, etc.
cbdumas 3y ago
Super cool that this shows latency under load! It's a shame ISPs seem to only market their throughput numbers, and never mention latency. So many people play multiplayer games now, you would think there would be at least some consumer demand to measure and improve latency over throughput.
jedberg 3y ago
I think this is great service, and here is another one that Netflix provides: https://fast.com https://fast.com That one uses Netflix servers, so you get a valid test as long as your ISP isn't throttling Netflix. Of course they created it so that people would call their ISP and complain they aren't getting the speed they pay for, but it turns out it's a pretty good test most of the time. And most importantly, it isn't prioritized like speedtest.net.
- ghshephard 3y ago
  The prioritization is critical for speedtest.net - it's entire purpose is to provide an assessment of your PHY - not your Network, and certainly not your Internet speed. speedtest.net should tell you if the physical installation of your cable was done properly - nothing more.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    Surely 98% of the people who use Speedtest.net don't understand that though...
  - illiac786 3y ago
    Depends what data you are after: physical bandwidth or the real bandwidth you'll get on a non prioritised website? I for one am after the second one, as it's closer to real life scenarios.
    - ghshephard 3y ago
      Right - for those you'll want fast.com, speed.cloudflare.com, fiber.google.com/speedtest/, etc... But at first you need to make sure that your fiber/co-ax/DSL was installed correctly - that's why all the cable testers I've watched use speedtest.net
Vicinity9635 3y ago
Interesting. I get higher speeds on cloudflare in chrome. 603Mbps Cloudflare chrome vs. 600 Mbps Cloudflare firefox But on fast.com (netflix) it's the opposite: 440 Mbps fast.com Chrome vs. 590 Mbps fast.com firefox.
- no_carrier 3y ago
  Late reply, but this could be due to your browsers handling DNS differently. Both are capable of using DoH (DNS over HTTPS) and using DNS settings independent of the rest of your PC.
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
I love the box plots! I wish more sites showed distribution information, including IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, because I suspect many movies and TV shows have at least bimodal distributions.
AtNightWeCode 3y ago
Historically this service is known for being highly incorrect.
cpcallen 3y ago
Sigh. Yet another site that completely fails if cookies are disabled: just an otherwise blank page with the message "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)", with DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document. in the console. I can believe that it may not be possible to run the test without local storage (though it's not obvious that that should be the case), but failing to verify that one's website degrades gracefully (and in the face of a totally standard and formerly common browser configuration, no less) deserves disparagment.
- JimmaDaRustla 3y ago
  Local storage is not cookies. This site stores no cookies. Looks like their map library uses local storage to persist the API key (or something innocuous) as a form of caching. This is on you for not letting apps cache data.
cjk 3y ago
Super impressive level of detail (and easy to understand, at that). Cloudflare went hard on the statistics here.
JimmaDaRustla 3y ago
The measured speeds are very inaccurate at times - it will often measure low on download and high on upload. Just used it and it rated my connection 277/48 on a 300/30 connection.
optymizer 3y ago
Download: 636Mbps Upload: 139Mbps Latency: 13.3ms Not bad for corp VPN.
MWil 3y ago
This is my test. Just got 5gbe fiber installed this week. https://imgur.com/a/fTG815R https://imgur.com/a/fTG815R

664 points by RadixDLT 3y ago

For detailed bufferbloat related statistics, I helped create the flent.org tool, many years ago. It shows details that the web tests cannot. I keep hoping more folk will see networks with single digit latency under load stats, like what we get from a good cake or fq_codel installation at the CPE, or with libreqos.io, preseem, etc at the ISP.

chewmieser 3y ago

Looks great! Didn’t realize there was much more that could be improved upon vs the alternatives but I think I’ll use this again next time. A dedicated domain would be nice. I probably wouldn’t recommend this to people like fast.com though due to the more complex interface, but I love it!

cybrox 3y ago
I actually really like the interface. You have the "generic" speed test information at the top and a lot more additional information at the bottom. It feels a bit overwhelming at first, though, granted.
superhumanuser 3y ago
I'm a fan on https://fast.com https://fast.com Minimal interface. More details behind a toggle if you need them.
thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
I love that it shows you the 90th percentile

eviks 3y ago

No way to use bytes instead of bits in the output?

cpfohl 3y ago
Not how it’s usually measured…link speed is pretty much always in bits/s
- LoganDark 3y ago
  I don't measure file size in bits. I don't want to multiply/divide by 8 when roughly estimating how long a download will take. I end up doing 10 instead for maximum ease and pessimism.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    At least it’s no longer in baud.
  - cpfohl 3y ago
    Link speed has always been measured in bits/s or as sibling comment suggests baud which is, still, just bits per second. Obviously a huge part of this is marketing for modems, ISPs, network cards, etc. but it’s consistent. The conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS… I agree with you that the difference is irritating, but wouldn’t have done any different if I were Cloudflare.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > baud which is, still, just bits per second. Isn't the baud-rate the number of signal transitions per second? How that maps to bits per second depends on the wire encoding.
      - cpfohl 3y ago
        This is probably more accurate! I was relying on fuzzy memories from an era long past! Thanks for the correction.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      > The conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS… Or the dedicated button on my keyboard that spawns a calculator. I don't care, though.

sorenjan 3y ago

I have a 250 Mb/s connection, but this claims I have over 440 Mb/s download speed. When looking closer at the details I get 250 Mb/s on all tests except the 1 MB download, so it's probably because of some compression or caching or similar, but I don't get the point of the larger tests if they don't affect the final score. I have never downloaded anything faster than 250 Mb/s before, so this is not a good reflection of my actual internet speed.

oneshtein 3y ago
Provider turned on "burst mode" for your link, for better customer experience.
jonathanlydall 3y ago
I suspect that your line has a configured limit as opposed to physical limit of 250mb/s (perhaps the fibre equipment is capable of 500mb/s or something). I've seen this ever since I moved to fibre about 8 years ago, I've never taken the fastest packages and whenever I test on speedtest.net it always starts off exceeding my limit, then comes down to my limit over a short while. The limiter for you may very well allow you to burst for a limited duration, so your speed on 1MB files are possibly at 440mb/s, but once you have sustained line usage it brings you down to your limit. I wouldn't know if this is an intentional feature or just because of how the limiter solution is implemented that it needs to sample over a certain period of time. It is a slightly useful behaviour if you're browsing the web and only occasionally clicking links which land up being downloaded way faster than your normal limit, but as you're only getting this speed if you do little to nothing for the 10s or 100s of seconds between opening pages, it doesn't have any negative effects over all.
- jnsaff2 3y ago
  I have seen similar shaping. This gives a quick responsive browsing experience but throttles bigger downloads/streaming. It also can be implemented badly. Azure VNET peering had 200M level and 100M level. Where 200M level was 200M most of the time, whereas 100M level was 200M for 30s and 0M for the next 30s.
- 3y ago

edent 3y ago

Tried on several devices - it consistently under-reads. I'm on 500Mbps broadband. Ookla and fast.com show 350Mbps via WiFi. Cloudflare only 274Mbps. Similar results on Ethernet. Over 400Mbps on a proper speed test. Can't hit 300 on this. I assume their downstream is capped?

yakubin 3y ago
Ookla traffic is known to be prioritised by ISPs. Maybe ISPs just haven’t caught up with Cloudflare yet and what you’re seeing now is more realistic speeds.
xnorswap 3y ago
There's an alternative explanation is that it's possible your ISP hasn't learned to prioritise this speed test traffic unlike other speed tests, and that this is more reflective of general real-world performance?
johneth 3y ago
I've read that often ISPs make exceptions for Ookla and fast.com speed tests by removing any sort of throttling to produce the best possible test results. I expect it isn't as easy for ISPs to treat Cloudflare like this, as it just looks like normal internet traffic.
- maccard 3y ago
  Got a source for ISPs doing that for fast.com? Fast.com is netflix, so the same argument applies there - if you get 300mbps on fast.com you should get it on netflix too
  - xnorswap 3y ago
    Indeed, that's part of what motivated netflix to make fast.com.
    - albert_e 3y ago

tebbers 3y ago

Pretty much bang on for me. 202 down, 195 up where my ISP has sold me 200Mbps symmetric. CommunityFibre in London, UK.

im_lince 3y ago

[flagged]

haunter 3y ago

Pretty much spot on for me. 2gig/1gig fiber internet and I got 1.95 Gbps/960 Mbps

FridgeSeal 3y ago
Wow that’s fast. Genuine question: what’s it like having internet that fast? Because I get 40-50Mbps down and ~16 Mbps down on that tool, and I have fibre to the property (yay, Australia) and I’m so curious to know what’s it like to have a connection that’s actually good.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I’ve ridden a 10g connection to the Internet and the main difference is that big downloads/uploads are near instant. For regular browsing it’s not that noticeable unless it’s also super low latency.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  I have 500 Mpbs, and the only noticeable difference versus a connection like yours is that you can download a Ubuntu ISO or a 1080p movie 1-2 minute. That's about it.

pseudo_meta 3y ago

btw, on macOS, you can just enter `networkQuality` into your terminal for a speed test. No third-party website or tool of any kind needed, it's a built-in mac CLI.

IntelMiner 3y ago
Who's it measuring against? An (internet) speed test by its nature requires some remote third-party, if you aren't just testing to your own server
- kimburgess 3y ago
  Default is Apple’s infra, but you can choose via a config flag. You can also run your own: https://github.com/network-quality/server https://github.com/network-quality/server
- sgt 3y ago
  They seem to have edge servers around the world. Even here in South Africa, I got idle latency to be 27ms so it must be somewhere in the country. This is from running networkQuality on a MacBook Pro.
- tantalor 3y ago
  In the case of tool built by Apple, running on Apple client hardware, against Apple remote server, that would be "1st party", not "3rd party".
  - illiac786 3y ago
    Apple traffic is also heavily prioritised nowadays. They want to avoid huge updates having to be redownloaded I expect. Apple TV would be another reason.
  - IntelMiner 3y ago
    Apple is a 3rd party to yourself

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gumballindie 3y ago

305 Mbps for me. Cringy how slow internet connetivity is in the UK.

maleldil 3y ago
Are you in London? My 1Gbps link gives 800-900Mbps in these speed tests, and I'm fine with that. It's a pitty that some of that is unused because I need to use a VPN. When I lived in a small town, my 500Mbps would give me >400Mbps consistently.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  MK area. I wish we had gigabit speeds available.
  - jonatron 3y ago
    Googling says there's CityFibre and Giganet in the MK area. Did they skip your house? A fibre company skipped my street in London.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Never heard of the two frankly. Thanks for sharing.
- secondcoming 3y ago
  That 800-900Mbps doesn't include the bits needed for IP packet headers, does it?
  - maleldil 3y ago
    I'm not sure. All I can say is that speedtest.net and fast.com both show 800/ 900 Mbps for download/upload.
shmde 3y ago
I remember me and my brother getting excited when torrent speeds used to touch 200 kbps. Good days.

jnsaff2 3y ago

Uff. Apparently gives correct readings mostly in Chrome only. I have a 500/500M connection and on the same computer Chrome gives 465/364 and Firefox has 311/303M. EDIT: this was on Linux/intel. On Mac M1Pro it Chrome/FF/Safari all get pretty much the same numbers. Both computers have wired ethernet.

dtaht 3y ago
I have tried to produce bufferbloat-related tools that measure things far more accurately and in more detail. https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/flaws_in_flent/ https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/flaws_in_flent/
moffkalast 3y ago
I've ran it multiple times in Chrome only and got vastly different results just there, from 200 to 600 down on a 500 connection. Must be heavily dependant on moment-to-moment network conditions I guess, to the point where it's nigh useless.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  Yes, the bandwidth test is so short that I'm not surprised it gets inconsistent results. I'd wager the speedtest.net being longer was not decided for fun, but to get more consistent results. edit: Now I realize that the later tiny-small-medium filesize downloads also add to your above-the-fold download performance, so the results of the initial warm-up test are discarded later.
  - dtaht 3y ago
    In general, none of the web based tests run for long enough. Some are configurable to run longer.
dsissitka 3y ago
Did you end up on the same server every time? The Atlanta server seems to be OK at the moment. https://i.imgur.com/SnA9rfH.png https://i.imgur.com/SnA9rfH.png

natrys 3y ago

Where I am, ISPs have arrangements to give intra-country traffic higher speed than inter-country. The nearest cloudflare PoP this chooses is always inside the country, so it gives misleading result.

notRobot 3y ago
This is why it's important to consult multiple speed tests, because it's not really a general "internet speed test", rather a "connection speed test" with a particular server.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I recently switched ISPs and went from something like 100mbs to 500mbs but because of how the new ISP peers some sites are actually slower now. Though the main ones I use now I can upload at 1000mbs so not going to complain too loud.

junon 3y ago

There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data in this elevator right now. EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.

bombcar 3y ago
Are you on local 5G? I’ve seen numbers like that. And they often put things in the elevator shafts to prevent dropout.
- bob1029 3y ago
  Might be this building: https://stelladoradus.com/case-study/mobile-signal-solution-in-an-elevator/ https://stelladoradus.com/case-study/mobile-signal-solution-...
johnsonjo 3y ago
Do you have 5G by chance? Have never really looked up 5G speeds until now, so I personally was suprised by what I found, but apparently the speeds can often be anywhere from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, so anywhere in that ballpark or possibly lower could be true. > The theoretical maximum speeds of 5G are pretty groundbreaking — but we have a very long way to go before you’re likely to hit that kind of peak speed in the real world, regardless of your connected device. Depending on your 5G coverage, maximum download speeds *often* range from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, and latency, or the time it takes to send data, could go as low as 1 millisecond (ms). [1] [1]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-fast-is-5g/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-fast-is-5g/
gargablegar 3y ago
Fast.com uses local Netflix instances for the data so if you near to one yea you can get high speeds. Also 5G might be in the building with you #tinfoilhat
DrFlipper 3y ago
I've been trouble shooting a dodgy 5G connection the last month or so and have entirely abandoned fast.com now. It seems susceptible to wildly inaccurate results when the connection is "bursty", the way 5G can be. I've got some very impressive screenshots from it though, next time anyone wants a measuring contest.

askvictor 3y ago

You also probably need some internal/LAN speed measurement tools. When your wifi link is over-crowded, measuring your uplink isn't much use. I use iperf3.

bombcar 3y ago
Many hosting/VPS providers run iperf3 servers you can hit, which can be useful. Why, here’s some now! https://github.com/R0GGER/public-iperf3-servers https://github.com/R0GGER/public-iperf3-servers

gorgoiler 3y ago

Why do these speed tests start out slow and then get faster over the course of a few seconds? Is it something about the internet that means the speed changes so much over the course of the test?

Severian 3y ago
It's a inherit effect of TCP congestion control. TCP slow start and Window Scaling.
dgb23 3y ago
I can't answer your question directly, because I don't know. But the first keyword I would look at would be BGP. Generally speaking, routing decisions are dynamic and constantly changing. Add the unreliability of the network layer, corporate politics and optimization heuristics to that and you get varying results. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-is-bgp/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
- bdavbdav 3y ago
  BGP / routing is likely to be static during the course of a test (and indeed much longer)
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Definitely nothing to do with BGP.
raphaelj 3y ago
That's how TCP works. TCP initially starts with a small transmission buffer (the congestion window), and gradually increases its size until it starts getting errors (packet drops or reordering).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

jerrygenser 3y ago

I clicked the about link in the top right. I was pleasantly surprised that it was quite a good advertisement for cloudflare workers.

haivri 3y ago

Wow, the level of detail exposed here is the best I've seen, super useful.

sva_ 3y ago

Very cool site, wish there was a dark mode.

bmo-at 3y ago

Is there a cli tool for this aswell or just the website? At home I have my server run a speedtest (ookla for now) running every 30 minutes because I do not trust my ISP to keep their end of the deal. I visualize the results with grafana and would love to change over to this. As haivri points out, this is a very detailed report! EDIT: Apparently there is a nodejs module available https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest Totally gonna start this project asap

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
darknavi 3y ago
I do this, although I have a little bit more trust in my fiber ISP. More just curious. I also wonder how much bandwidth I am using by running all of these tests, but my ISP doesn't have any caps so I guess it doesn't matter.
beyonddream 3y ago
amazing to see this JS library uses minimal direct dependencies and even a separate devDependencies that are not needed for runtime - https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest/blob/main/package.json#L45C1-L49C5 https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest/blob/main/package.js...
illiac786 3y ago
Do you know samknows? Does that for you.

auselen 3y ago

No share/record/export/save button?

bmo-at 3y ago
There is a csv export and sharing to twitter and facebook for me, right nect to pause/retest

sebzim4500 3y ago

Smart. With a bit of SEO/marketing, this will become the way consumers judge their internet quality. If connection quality = ping to cloudflare then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating position for peering agreements etc.

jeroenhd 3y ago
There are decent alternatives for this. Fast.com is hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling. Google has a speedtest as well (Google "speed test" and it'll show a button). The more of these tests start appearing, the better.
- vijaykodam 3y ago
  Google partners with Measurement Lab (M-Lab) to run this test.
  - Thoreandan 3y ago
    I liked the detailed output of the M-LAB tests, unfortunately the amount of data has fallen over time. They'd also check for traffic shaping / blocking once upon a time. I think the project lasted only as long as the grad students who wrote it were there.
- Aachen 3y ago
  > hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling That's exactly what the person above you meant about Cloudflare, right? By using the Netflix speedtest as a benchmark, you're promoting good connectivity to another commercial entity (for good or for bad, I don't mean to judge, just stating)
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that ISPs will intentionally throttle. Reduce the bandwidth for all Netflix servers to 5mbps and suddenly you're stuck watching at 480p or 720p, even if the connection can handle multiple 4k streams. This is abused for "unlimited data" subscriptions that aren't unlimited when you actually try to consume more data than a standard subscription would allow you to. Of course that's completely illegal in countries with net neutrality laws, but not every country has those. I can't think of a reason why a shitty ISP would throttle Cloudflare, as Cloudflare mostly hosts small files. As an ISP you want customers to think websites are nice and fast, because if only Netflix is slow, surely the problem lies with Netflix, right? If speedtest.net says you have gigabit, Cloudflare says the same, and fast.com is giving you 5mbps, your ISP is messing with your bandwidth. It could be that Netflix has technical issues, but you'd read about those. That's why these tests are useful, and why we need more like them.

jgrahamc 3y ago

If you're interested in this then you might be interested in the global Internet quality data we are publishing: https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality and https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-radar-internet-quality-page/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-radar-internet-quali...

akino_germany 3y ago
Your layout is broken in everything but Chrome.
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  I do not see an issue with Firefox or Safari on my machine. Feel free to email me (jgc@cloudflare.com) with what you are seeing.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Works for me in Firefox. Plugins maybe?
  - akino_germany 3y ago
    Yes, the add-on to disable Google Analytics https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout was the problem. Never had that break a web page before.
- tiagod 3y ago
  It should be working now. This was an interaction between React's streaming hydration errors (due to unexpected HTML injected by extensions) and one of the frontend dependencies.

rishishah20 3y ago

It's Awesome, giving almost right result

Giorgi 3y ago

how to change server? default one is too close, I need to test oversea connection

Pxtl 3y ago

It's very cool, but I thing the initial download-speed test is very misleading. Consistently I get like 2/3 of my max, but then when I let it run to completion and it goes through the longer download tests it ramps up to my full speed and I get the full value.

dboreham 3y ago
Um. That's how TCP works.

secondcoming 3y ago

Maybe it's because I'm using 5G as my home broadband, but it seems massively off when compared to Google's SpeedTest and SpeedTest.net

mstade 3y ago

I tried this on my home wifi (fiber backend) and got scores in range with what I expect. Then I tried it again outside the house, a block away using a 5G connection and much to my surprise the bandwidth in downloading was MUCH better (almost 3x) and upload somewhat better (1.5x). The 5G connection had worse latency characteristics though, which is to be expected of course. Obviously this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but I mention it because I'm genuinely surprised that 5G works this well. I've read all the claims but this is the first time I measure it, and frankly if I didn't need lower latency I might've just considered ditching the fiber.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
LTE was like this for a year or two also, in the areas that got it deployed first before handsets using it were widely available. It was several times faster than wired consumer internet at the time, though I also remember the latency not being great. Then within a product cycle or two everyone's phones had it and it went back to normal. I'd expect a similar thing here enjoy it while it lasts I guess.

grumpy_coder 3y ago

Would be nice to aggregate some of these together. One 'speed' has always been a bad proxy for all the different speeds you get from ISP local caches (that most companies can't get in), local COLO/CDN, regional AWS/Azure/etc... and us-east

madeofpalk 3y ago

Great, one more speedtest site to pit against all the others. On my gigabyte fibre: Cloudflare: 697 down / 645 up fast.com: 860 down / 440 up Google: 760 down / 347 up Ookla speedtest: 841 down / 827 up Quite a large variability in upload speeds, which isn't all the surprising I guess. Network providers often don't really need to prioritise upload traffic...

trvz 3y ago
> On my gigabyte fibre: *gigabit Get it right already.
- Aissen 3y ago
  I have a gigabyte fiber connection @ home (Technically 10G EPON which has an effective top speed of 8Gb), so there's no way of knowing if it was a mistake or not. (you're probably downvoted because of the dismissive tone though)
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  I misspoke, but you understood what I meant so no harm was done.
waynesonfire 3y ago
cloudflare: 863 down / 57 / up ookla speedtest: 940 up / 750 down

remram 3y ago

Supports IPv6 too. That's a nice surprise.

jgrahamc 3y ago
We've been massive advocates of IPv6 since at least 2012: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-challenge-to-the-web/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-challenge-to-the-web/

badrequest 3y ago

I ran the test from Austin, and it showed the test server as located at the Dallas Airport. I wonder how they decided on which landmarks to represent each data center.

theandrewbailey 3y ago
Cloudflare represents each datacenter by the nearest airport code, even though it's not literally at the airport. https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/gathering-information-for-troubleshooting-sites/#identify-the-cloudflare-data-center-serving-your-request https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ge...

NelsonMinar 3y ago

The interesting thing about this to me is its repeated sampling and reporting of a statistical profile of the link. Showing distributions for latency and speed, not just a single average. Really helpful info on less-consistent connections like Starlink. Example screenshot here: https://postimg.cc/bDTyy8BM https://postimg.cc/bDTyy8BM

tomsmeding 3y ago
That website is not zoomable on mobile, which is a pretty grave offence for an _image posting site_.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  ugh you're right. I'm on the lookout for an imgur replacement, do you have a recommendation?
  - RunningDroid 3y ago
    Minimal file hosts like https://catbox.moe https://catbox.moe or http://0x0.st http://0x0.st work nice in my opinion, here's an example link: https://files.catbox.moe/zamm2d.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/zamm2d.jpg The only catch is most of them set a time limit on uploads, but you might be able to (ab)use archive.org if you want the files to stay online forever.

6bb32646d83d 3y ago

Upload results are off for me. I have a 1gbps down/up fiber. With this speed test, the results are 900mbps down, 400-500mbps up (ran a few tests to confirm) I tried running fast.com, speedtest.net, google speed test and verizon speed test (I'm on AT&T), they all show ~950mbps down and up

xyzelement 3y ago

I recently discovered the networkquality tool on Mac. As far as I can tell it's the only tool that measures simultaneous upload and download speeds which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases. I was using it to see if my new hardcore gaming router gave me better range than the old one. On isolated up and down tests, it did. But on combined tests, the advantage especially for upload disappeared.

CrLf 3y ago
> which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases What's more reflective of real world use cases is a hot discussion topic. :) The "networkQuality" tool on macOS and other implementations(1) of the "RPM" algorithm(2) are very good to see how an Internet connection behaves under high stress. But the real world is seldom high stress (100Mbps+ connections are rarely pushed to the limit, honestly). In your example, video conferencing indeed does simulataneous upload and download, but it's also low bandwidth (relatively speaking) and doesn't usually come close to saturating a connection. It can impacted by other traffic in the same connection though. Which can come from a single user, or multiple users sharing the same connection. And neither networkQuality nor Cloudflare's speed test measure how a connection behaves with multiple users stressing a connection. In the end, which tool you use depends on what you're trying to measure. For me, the Cloudflare speed test is closer to measuring what I experience in real world use. (1) https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness (2) https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiveness-00.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiv...
- xyzelement 3y ago
  Yes fair enough. I know my link is great - I pay for 300 up and down and that's what I get. I was running measurements to track degradation in wifi performance due to distance from the router - out in the yard - and how much difference one of these 8 antenna monster routers made. My use case is 100 video conferencing that I want to do reliability from the yard.

awslattery 3y ago

This has been my go-to over Fast.com for years. The breakdown of latencies and speeds at different thresholds was very beneficial in validating the behavior of our 5G Home Internet through Verizon.

itvision 3y ago

I use fast.com instead. This one tests a 10MB chunk at last and that's the only reliable indication for me. 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping).

CrLf 3y ago
> 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping). That's related to TCP congestion control. TCP starts slow and ramps up speed as download progresses. But you're right that latency also has an impact on smaller downloads, and that's why latency is a critical measurement of connection quality for everyone, not just gamers.

uncertainrhymes 3y ago

The level of detail is very nice, I wish more tools exposed this as easily. That said, please remember this is a test of you through your ISP to a (hopefully) nearby Cloudflare node. It isn't necessarily testing 'the Internet', since Cloudflare sometimes has creative peering relationships to origins that are not being measured here. Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate.

networkchad 3y ago
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capableweb 3y ago
> unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth Well, having a good network card and frequently downloading large files (which I'm guessing lots of people do here, especially those in ML/AI and related fields), I'm not sure why the downloads wouldn't go faster if you didn't have more bandwidth... People use the internet for more than just watching movies you know.
- Arelius 3y ago
  Yeah, for sure, I'm often syncing multi gigabyte repositories while me and my wife are on video conferences. You really feel the extra bandwidth then.
nrb 3y ago
> Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate. Haven’t downloaded any 150+ GB games (or patches even these days) off of Steam lately I see
- sushisource 3y ago
  Yeah. Comcast is shorting me by a solid 50Mb/s and this is the reason it's annoying. On top of the fact that their garbage excuse for a website is literally completely broken. Every time I've tried to use it for the past year it just sticks me in a login loop. What a truly miserable company.

aidenn0 3y ago

The upload speed numbers are highly suspect. I have cable that shows 32Mbps on every test I've ever run and yet CF is showing an absurd 221Mbps [edit] I saw the more detailed information below. The high speed comes entirely from 2 outliers on the 1MB upload test; all of the 10MB tests were clustered around 32Mbps [edit2] I reran and got similar results again with 3 1MB uploads over 200Mbps and all other uploads clustered around 32Mbps

reboot81 3y ago

Seems like a great alternative to blip. https://github.com/apenwarr/blip https://github.com/apenwarr/blip

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Anything new here?

teddyh 3y ago

Users in Sweden should use <https://www.bredbandskollen.se/ https://www.bredbandskollen.se/>.

p1mrx 3y ago

Nice. Every speed test should have a "latency under load" graph, because we can't fight bufferbloat if we can't see it. DSLReports had the first bufferbloat test I'm aware of, but it's broken now. Another example is https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat Ideally this problem should be fixed by ISPs and modem manufacturers, but individuals can use OpenWrt with luci-app-sqm, at least when the connection has a predictable speed limit. An option to choose between IPv4/IPv6 (or test both) would probably be useful.

sinak 3y ago
Ah the Waveform test is ours! I've been meaning to post it properly to HN since we launched it. It's far from being a perfect bufferbloat/latency under load test, and there's lots of room to improve it, but we built it when DSL Reports seemed to be running a little unreliably. We actually use Cloudflare and Fastly on the backend for latency/speed testing. We built and host the test for free mostly because I wanted it, but I justified the dev time as it being very-roundabout marketing for us - so if you ever need a signal booster or MIMO antenna for 5G internet, looks us up :).
- dtaht 3y ago
  In some cases, the upload portion of the waveform test appears to be broken, btw. I worry that underneath it has switched from cubic to BBR and is thus understanding what a normal user actually experiences. Otherwise I still feel yours is the best web based latency under load test out there! Thank you for creating it and keeping it going so long! (Can I have you add preseem, libreqos, etc, to the FAQ?)
- trendal 3y ago
  Hey, I love that tool. Use it all the time at our Wisp installs. And it's easy to point clients to it and have them send me the results. If you need donations to keep it going please reach out.
- deleted 3y ago
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3y ago

jedisct1 3y ago

What are speed tests that work from the command line?

uncertainrhymes 3y ago
If you have easy access to an arbitrarily large file (or an online random file generator) curl has timing variables that can be exposed via the -w flag. e.g. Create a format file named curltime.txt containing: time_namelookup: %{time_namelookup}s\n time_connect: %{time_connect}s\n time_redirect: %{time_redirect}s\n time_starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}s\n ----------\n time_total: %{time_total}s\n then curl -svo /dev/null -w "@curltime.txt" https://example.com/my_arbitrary_file https://example.com/my_arbitrary_file Would result in something like: time_namelookup: 0.048205s time_connect: 0.079001s time_redirect: 0.000000s time_starttransfer: 0.377603s ---------- time_total: 0.412150s
- jedisct1 3y ago
  That doesn't provide any information about jitter, latency, packet loss, DNS, location, etc.

cbdumas 3y ago

Super cool that this shows latency under load! It's a shame ISPs seem to only market their throughput numbers, and never mention latency. So many people play multiplayer games now, you would think there would be at least some consumer demand to measure and improve latency over throughput.

jedberg 3y ago

I think this is great service, and here is another one that Netflix provides: https://fast.com https://fast.com That one uses Netflix servers, so you get a valid test as long as your ISP isn't throttling Netflix. Of course they created it so that people would call their ISP and complain they aren't getting the speed they pay for, but it turns out it's a pretty good test most of the time. And most importantly, it isn't prioritized like speedtest.net.

ghshephard 3y ago
The prioritization is critical for speedtest.net - it's entire purpose is to provide an assessment of your PHY - not your Network, and certainly not your Internet speed. speedtest.net should tell you if the physical installation of your cable was done properly - nothing more.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Surely 98% of the people who use Speedtest.net don't understand that though...
- illiac786 3y ago
  Depends what data you are after: physical bandwidth or the real bandwidth you'll get on a non prioritised website? I for one am after the second one, as it's closer to real life scenarios.
  - ghshephard 3y ago
    Right - for those you'll want fast.com, speed.cloudflare.com, fiber.google.com/speedtest/, etc... But at first you need to make sure that your fiber/co-ax/DSL was installed correctly - that's why all the cable testers I've watched use speedtest.net

Vicinity9635 3y ago

Interesting. I get higher speeds on cloudflare in chrome. 603Mbps Cloudflare chrome vs. 600 Mbps Cloudflare firefox But on fast.com (netflix) it's the opposite: 440 Mbps fast.com Chrome vs. 590 Mbps fast.com firefox.

no_carrier 3y ago
Late reply, but this could be due to your browsers handling DNS differently. Both are capable of using DoH (DNS over HTTPS) and using DNS settings independent of the rest of your PC.

dr_kiszonka 3y ago

I love the box plots! I wish more sites showed distribution information, including IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, because I suspect many movies and TV shows have at least bimodal distributions.

AtNightWeCode 3y ago

Historically this service is known for being highly incorrect.

cpcallen 3y ago

Sigh. Yet another site that completely fails if cookies are disabled: just an otherwise blank page with the message "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)", with DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document. in the console. I can believe that it may not be possible to run the test without local storage (though it's not obvious that that should be the case), but failing to verify that one's website degrades gracefully (and in the face of a totally standard and formerly common browser configuration, no less) deserves disparagment.

JimmaDaRustla 3y ago
Local storage is not cookies. This site stores no cookies. Looks like their map library uses local storage to persist the API key (or something innocuous) as a form of caching. This is on you for not letting apps cache data.

cjk 3y ago

Super impressive level of detail (and easy to understand, at that). Cloudflare went hard on the statistics here.

JimmaDaRustla 3y ago

The measured speeds are very inaccurate at times - it will often measure low on download and high on upload. Just used it and it rated my connection 277/48 on a 300/30 connection.

optymizer 3y ago

Download: 636Mbps Upload: 139Mbps Latency: 13.3ms Not bad for corp VPN.

MWil 3y ago

This is my test. Just got 5gbe fiber installed this week. https://imgur.com/a/fTG815R https://imgur.com/a/fTG815R