Today I've switched it back to large receive window max.

The customer base is everything from GPRS to gigabit. But I know from experience that if a test doesn't flatten someones gigabit connection they will immediately assume "oh congested servers, insufficient capacity" and the early adopters of fiber to the home and faster cable products are the most visible in tech forums and so on.

It would be interesting to set one or a few servers with a small receive window, take them from the pool, and allow an option to select those, otherwise they would not participate in any default run. Then as you point out, the test can suggest trying those as an option for results with chaotic upload speeds and probable bloat. The person would notice the beauty of the more intimate connection between their kernel and a server, and work harder to eliminate the problematic equipment. Or. They'd stop telling me the test was bugged.

thanks

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 12:28 AM, David Lang <david@lang.hm> wrote:

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015, David Lang wrote:

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015, David Lang wrote:

I suspect you guys are going to say the server should be left with a large
max receive window.. and let people complain to find out what their issue
is.

what is your customer base? how important is it to provide faster service to teh fiber users? Are they transferring ISO images so the difference is significant to them? or are they downloading web pages where it's the difference between a half second and a quarter second? remember that you are seeing this on the upload side.

in the long run, fixing the problem at the client side is the best thing to do, but in the meantime, you sometimes have to work around broken customer stuff.

for the speedtest servers, it should be set large, the purpose is to test the quality of the customer stuff, so you don't want to do anything on your end that papers over the problem, only to have the customer think things are good and experience problems when connecting to another server that doesn't implement work-arounds.

Just after hitting send it occured to me that it may be the right thing to have the server that's being hit by the test play with these settings. If the user works well at lower settings, but has problems at higher settings, the point where they start having problems may be useful to know.

David Lang
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