Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated! I'm a product manager here at Cloudflare, responsible for launching this tool. Since the launch, we've found some issues that we're going to address:
- Especially for users with a very fast Internet connection, speed.cloudflare.com reports upload speeds much lower than expected figures. We don't yet know what is causing this but will disable the upload part of the test until we know more.
- In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.
- Re: the speed test automatically starting: we appreciate the feedback and understand why some users may not want this as default behavior. We will disable the auto-start for now.
In the meantime, we appreciate any and all feedback, please keep it coming: you can reach me at achiel [at] cloudflare.com
> - In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.
For what it's worth, Cloudflare shows me at 10mbps down, and Speedtest shows me at 160mbps (much closer to my expected 200mbps). This is a large difference.
speedtest.net (and I expect quite a few other speed tests) will open many connections to overcome slowness caused by TCP (low max window sizes and slow scaling). This is likely where the download discrepancy is coming from.
Personally I prefer the single TCP connection results as these tell me what I'm likely to see in a real-world situation such as web browsing with HTTP/2 or a large download.
I'm also getting 10 - 43mbps and 75ms+ ping w/ 60ms jitter on speed.Cloudflare (vs 550mbps and <10ms on fast.com).
I've confirmed the 500mbps speed I pay for in Montreal is accurate with my own iperf and iperf3 tests to physical servers I own in NYC, so it's not a "your ISP is colluding with the speedtest sites" thing. I've also confirmed I have a 1ms rtt to 8.8.8.8, and a 10ms rtt to 1.1.1.1 with ~2ms jitter by pinging them in terminal.
These CF test results worry me somewhat because I host a bunch of traffic on servers in my closet over Cloudflare Argo tunnels, does this mean those services are only able to push ~45mbps with 60ms ping via Cloudflare? Or is this just an artifact of something weird going on with the test methodology?
For Bitcoin, we run a open source relay network called FIBRE, and incredibly low latency network which uses some encoding tricks to gain significantly faster than TCP transmission of block data around the world. It's currently limited in part by the number of points of presence that can be reasonably operated from. Is there anybody at Cloudflare that would be interested in taking this on using your incredibly latency-diverse network?
