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brennentsmith / internet-speed-logger

Open source application to track your internet download and upload speeds with an elegant web interface.
GNU General Public License v3.0
178 stars 33 forks source link

MinimumIntervalS = 1800 #13

Closed fitzgeraldsteele closed 4 years ago

fitzgeraldsteele commented 4 years ago

What is the reason for the 1800 sec (30min) minimum interval for the checks? Is there throttling somewhere on the speedtest API? Any reason why I couldn't set to, say 5 min intervals on my network?

brennentsmith commented 4 years ago

As the lead for the infrastructure team at Speedtest.net - I don't want my app stack hammered too hard by millions of people testing every 5 minutes. Kidding - but one of the reasons I released this code was to help provide a good reference implementation of best practices. 😄

More serious answer - the reason being is really a safety check. People often forget that the whole purpose of Speedtest is to saturate the internet connection, and we are good at it. The protocol is designed to be incredibly greedy, so unless active QOS is in place, it will impact other service performance (it'll clobber VOIP/streaming/etc). People also forget how much data this may burn through - on a high speed connection, you're going to potentially be moving terabytes per week.

It's OSS - I can't stop you from forking and removing the check, but I highly recommend thinking about the potential impact to your connection if you test every 5 minutes. We've found through working with hardware manufacturers and integrators that a skewed 30 minute period is a nice sweet spot.

fitzgeraldsteele commented 4 years ago

No, that makes sense. Thanks.

jimthedj65 commented 8 months ago

this is great update, I just installed the logger and was wondering what the time frequency between tests was. many thanks for a great app.