Don't trust speedtest / looking glass files.

HammadKhan

I was testing looking glass of different vps providers and I found that one vps provider had extremely fast speed (Hard to believe to be honest). Later on I found that it was just a Gzip compression trick.

I just made a demo so you can check it :

http://developer.com.pk/speedtest/100mb.test (Cheat File)

http://developer.com.pk/speedtest/another.test (Orignal File)

Maybe most of you already know this, but I believe it will be helpful for some people. Turn Gzip/Compression off before trying speedtest / looking glass files.

Sorry for my bad English.

rds100

Just use wget for speed testing? It doesn't send 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' by default.

BBTN

Thanks Hammad, but I also always use wget or axel for speedtest files.

black

curl also doesn't use compression by default

BrianHarrison

It was probably an honest oversight. The sysadmin who enabled gzip for their web server probably wasn't thinking about the potential for affecting the results of a speed test file.

awvnx

Now replace that file with one that's 100GB of /dev/zero and gzip compressed and fill up people's hard drives in seconds (when using a browser to download)

Pwner

@awvnx said:
Now replace that file with one that's 100GB of /dev/zero and gzip compressed and fill up people's hard drives in seconds (when using a browser to download)

That's not even funny, that's being a dick.

FirstVM_com

Interesting. never heard of that.