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Author Topic: Ping times  (Read 1721 times)

Weaver

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Ping times
« on: October 30, 2019, 02:36:13 AM »

I noticed something odd about the ‘ping times’ reported by two speed testers; speedtest2.aa.net.uk and the Ookla iOS app (see also the web version at speedtest.net). The former reports a ping time of 48ms and the latter 39ms - these times are very consistent.

My question: why the difference ?

The answer is obvious - different route to the server, different testing methodology, maybe even congestion. However in this case the result is bizarre given that speedtester2.aa.net.uk is at Andrews and Arnold, which is my ISP, so you would think that no one else could be closer, yet it is consistently 9ms longer. Is there some difference in the method of calculation or in the software’s approach to measurement which could explain such a huge difference?

Second question: is that round-trip time?

Round trip time is obviously easiest to measure but it would be nice to know both of the one way times? Does anyone know of such a facility?

You would have to send a message containing a hi-res timestamp in it and then you would have to know what the difference between the clocks in the two o/s is, or else synchronise the two very accurately. Doesn’t sound impossible providing the clocks are known accurately enough. You would have to hope for no other traffic in the critical timing period.
« Last Edit: October 30, 2019, 02:44:52 AM by Weaver »
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Chrysalis

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Re: Ping times
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2019, 10:11:52 PM »

the website code could well be a factor, that is a weakness of speedtesters and has to be taken into account.

Ideally speedtesters should be cli based.

if you provide the url's I will check on my end.
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Weaver

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Re: Ping times
« Reply #2 on: October 31, 2019, 04:54:28 AM »

i ran the AA test tool at http://speedtest2.aa.net.uk/
vs
Ookla app in the iOS AppStore set to server = Community Fibre in London
(the website speedtest.net gives slightly different results but is a web-based similar-looking tester)

[Moderator edited to fix the broken link.]
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 03:49:58 PM by burakkucat »
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Chrysalis

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Re: Ping times
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2019, 11:52:54 AM »

I didnt test ookla given I would need to on a different device which add's way too many variables into the mix, but the aaisp web based tester gives the lowest latency I have seen reported on a web based tester, under 10ms.
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Weaver

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Re: Ping times
« Reply #4 on: October 31, 2019, 01:24:15 PM »

Any clues then as to what might be going on? Is the Ookla app just exceptionally good, or broken/lying? The speedtest.net web-based tool with a very similar appearance to the ookla app also gives a much lower figure than speedtester2.aa.net.

Your tests show that for you at least the AA speed tester does not read exceptionally high. I wonder if AA’s BT users and TT users get the same ping times ?

Anyway, it seems to prove that the ping results from some or all of these testers are completely worthless if you can get a ~20% variation.
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Chrysalis

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Re: Ping times
« Reply #5 on: October 31, 2019, 01:58:43 PM »

Testing from different suppliers like the way you are is going to lead to inconsistent data.

There is a lot of variables such as.

Network conditions, and yes BT vs TT backhaul will play a part as well, for me if I switched to BTw backhaul,. my traffic would go north before going south to London as the BT network is not optimised for Leicester as an end point.  I expect in other locations TT would have higher latency than BTw.
The device been tested on.  e.g. a wired powerful desktop PC vs say a low end phone connected via congested 2.4ghz wifi and a weak signal to boot.
The software been used, dedicated app, vs chrome vs firefox vs something like speedtest-cli.  There is a reason I use a good old cli ping command when diagnosing things like latency.
Also programming language and optimisations of the code.
Affects of intermediate software/devices proxies, anti virus, vpn etc.
The way latency is even measured, some will measure "during" the speedtest like tbb do, others measure during idle, some may add values to whats measured, strip off peaks and troughs etc.
Some may measure via udp, icmp or tcp.  Different sized packets.

So I cannot give a reason why ookla gives a low result, but if its lower than what you get from command line ping, its probably been skewed by something.

Also check out dslreport's tester, that one is interesting as it lets you heavily customise how the test runs, you can pick the test server's used, the way the data download (fetch vs get etc.), how often the latency is measured during test, the timer used for measurement etc. and these can significantly affect the test outcome.  Bear in mind as well chrome has added a ton of performance affecting features lately, they doing things like throttle timers, capping cpu utilisation of javascript etc. which can skew speedtesters.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 02:12:00 PM by Chrysalis »
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Weaver

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Re: Ping times
« Reply #6 on: October 31, 2019, 03:49:23 PM »

A Debian ARM64 Raspberry Pi command line ping test to bottomless.aa.net.uk gave 34.1 ms min over IPv6 and 34.9 ms min over IPv4. Those results are using a wired ethernet connection. (All the results I gave in earlier posts were from my wireless iPad using a very fast WLAN in a BSS that hogs one 5GHz 40MHz channel pair and has no other users in it.) These times are the minima; the maximum seen was 37.3 ms and so the 39ms reported by the Ookla app is outside the spread of these *nix CLI results, but not hugely.

Using a ping test app on the iPad to bottomless.aa.net.uk over ipv4 gave a min ping time of 37.2 ms, mean 42 ms.

So this all seems to be about the AA speedtester for me, but not for Chrysalis.

I tried simply pinging speedtest2.aa.net.uk from my Raspberry Pi which gave a min of 35.1ms over IPv6, 34.6ms over IPv4.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 04:02:05 PM by Weaver »
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