An example would be if an ISP says your connection will be between 3mb down and 6mb down. 6mb down/1mb up is the uppper limit of my connection. For example I pay for a 6mb down/ 1mb up connection. Just remember that the connection you pay for from you ISP is an UPPER limit (most of the time). Through put is a pretty easy test, just go to one of the sites listed here and it will test your upload/download speeds. Responsiveness is how fast does my request make it the destination and back. Through put is how much data can be pushed or pulled through the connection (download/upload). There are more but I am sticking to the main 2 (in my opinion). Particularly fancy flash animations seem utterly useless, and as I've said actually can skew results significantly.Ī good connection is made up of key parts: Through put and responsiveness. They will give you a rough number that may help generally, but you should be aware of the limitations. The tests others have suggested all fall foul of these technical problems. Not sure of a perfect resource for this, but Steve Souder writes extensively on web performance at least: Is 180 really better than 150 when the variability is +- 100? One needs to average across repeat tests, and critically, variance needs to be estimated. Most tests do something once, and a single sample is not sufficient to know something reliably. If you are testing torrent speed, you need huge numbers of small bandwidth HTTP/UDP connections. A browser test should use multiple resources (remembering CSS and JS can block successive downloads in some browsers) across multiple tabs to reproduce real circumstances. That tests are tailored to what is being tested! Don't use flash unless you are testing flash network performance on single files.To make these tests better, the methodology needs to reflect: If you do use Flash or Java to download single large files, then these tests may be more relevant.Īlso, I've seen great variability in results across browser for some flash tests, which has to do with the way browsers handle flash animation, thus skewing results with no relation to network performance. These tests also normally use a single large file, totally bypassing the benefits of persistent connections and HTTP/1.1 pipelining only some browsers support natively. Almost all tests use Flash or Java, totally bypassing your browser HTTP stack. I'd say most speed tests are flawed if you want to measure web browsing performance (which is what a sizable number of people will be doing).
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