Testing 1gbps bandwidth

Tue Aug 14 15:28:47 UTC 2012

On Tue, 14 Aug 2012, Eric Wieling wrote:

> Is there a speedtest.net-like site you like?

The problems can be:
1. Finding one that gives consistent results, as others have already 
noted.
2. Finding one that is topologically close to you.  Me testing from my 
office in Pittsburgh, PA to a server in Washington, DC isn't necessarily 
an accurate test if I have to jump through 4-5 different ASs to reach it.
3. Path asymmetry can skew your test results.  The path between you and 
the test server is not necessarily (often isn't) the same as the path 
from the test server back to you, and problems on the return path might 
not be as readily visible to you, when you only have access to a full 
suite of diagnostic tools at only one end.

Sometimes speed-test sites are fine for basic benchmarking, but I wouldn't 
treat the results as gospel of rely on them alone to prove/disprove 
whether a provider is delivering the bandwidth I contracted for.

jms

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Hilliard [mailto:nick at foobar.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:09 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Testing 1gbps bandwidth
>
> On 14/08/2012 15:43, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> case trying to use one of the speedtest.net servers - we had a clear
>> 10G path out through like 3 AS's in a row, the bottleneck was
>> speedtest.net's server. :)
>
> you'll have to forgive me for being the cynical type, but I gave up on Speedtest the day they reported 146Mbit/sec download over a link which was hard-wired to 100Mbit/sec full duplex, and later that day they reported 2Mbit from another nearby server to the same box.  I figured a stddev of 2 orders of magnitude wasn't going to give me figures accurate enough for my requirements.
>
> But hey, this is the Internet: ymmv, ianal, lolwut, bbq.
>
> Nick
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