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compressible test file over https ?

rds100rds100 Member
edited November 2012 in General

I remember there was drama some time ago about a provider having his highly compressible test file served over https, which lead to unrealistically high transfer speeds observed by some clients.

My question is - is this common practice? I am asking because i noticed today another provider doing the same thing and got curious. Please note that i do not want to name the provider - it might be just an oversight and not something intentional. No need for more drama.

Comments

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited November 2012

    I've heard of this but it confuses me. Singlehop I think it was? Admittedly creative compression isn't my area of expertise. Personally I just wget cachefly's file for mine, not even sure why.

  • rds100rds100 Member

    @jarland you can only wget the cachefly file after you already have a VPS with the said provider. And it only tests the speed towards the VPS, not from the VPS.
    I was talking about the test IP / test file published by providers in their offers, so potential customers could test the upload network speed of that provider.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    I mean for our test file on our test server. Just in case anyone would ever accuse me of it, it'd be news to me, and I'd be mad at cachefly ;)

  • rds100rds100 Member

    :) Just try to gzip it and see if it gets smaller. And if your testfile url is not https - it doesn't matter anyway.

  • concerto49concerto49 Member

    We use @Telephone looking glass without modifications.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    Good to know :)

  • SimpleNodeSimpleNode Member

    Everyone loves @telephone LG :)

  • AlexBarakovAlexBarakov Patron Provider, Veteran

    @jarland said: Personally I just wget cachefly's file for mine, not even sure why.

    Cause it's easy.. I do the same thing :)

  • rds100rds100 Member

    Just checked, cachefly's 100mb.test is highly compressible. So if you are serving it over https it could be seen as kind of cheating. Hopefully most people are using plain http to host their testfiles.

  • gsrdgrdghdgsrdgrdghd Member

    Can't you also compress content via GZIP or so over HTTP?

  • rds100rds100 Member

    @gsrdgrdghd only if the client supports it? And i doubt wget does. While AFAIK for the https/SSL layer the compression happens transparently at the transport layer, the download client isn't even aware of it.

  • concerto49concerto49 Member

    @rds100 said: Hopefully most people are using plain http to host their testfiles.

    We're using http only.

  • telephonetelephone Member

    @rds100 said: Just checked, cachefly's 100mb.test is highly compressible. So if you are serving it over https it could be seen as kind of cheating. Hopefully most people are using plain http to host their testfiles.

    Yep, that's the nature of sparse files (empty files).
    This also brought up a good point for my LG. I've made a reference to add an alternative way to create test files:

    head -c 100MB /dev/urandom > 100MB.test

    Using head (and urandom), you can effectively make test files that won't be compressed, giving a true representation if served behind SSL or gzip.
    The only disadvantage is the time it takes to create said file (a 100 MB test file takes roughly 30 seconds to create).

    @concerto49 said: We use @Telephone looking glass without modifications.

    @SimpleNode said: Everyone loves @telephone LG :)

    Thanks guys ;)

  • HC_RoHC_Ro Member
    edited November 2012

    It was SingleHop. They got flamed fairly hard for it. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1083020

    They were able to produce speeds above capable bandwidth lmfao

  • kbeeziekbeezie Member

    gzipped files would transfer faster over http, not https, https uses encryption protocol between the two and as such would actually be slower and higher CPU usage on the server.

    But like telephone said, if you randomize the data quite a bit, the webserver can't as easily gzip the content to a much smaller size, than a simple repeated pattern.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    @rds100 said: Just checked, cachefly's 100mb.test is highly compressible. So if you are serving it over https it could be seen as kind of cheating. Hopefully most people are using plain http to host their testfiles.

    Good to know. For me it's:
    apt-get install lighttpd
    cd /var/www
    wget whatever/100mb.test
    "Hey guys here's the test file"

  • marrcomarrco Member

    it looks like someone just tried this trick on a LEB advertised host: http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/hosthink-6-95month-1gb-openvz-vps-in-turkey/

    nice to see that even the small adsl line i have at home is capable of downloading a 100MB file in just a few seconds using google chrome!

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    I noticed that, downloaded in literally 2 seconds.

  • marrcomarrco Member

    did an additional test, and they are sending out a gzipped version of their highly compressible (fake) test file:

    curl -I  -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' https://www.hosthink.net/100mb.test
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:47:30 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
Last-Modified: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 07:41:31 GMT
ETag: "985c2a-6400000-3f1276898e0c0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/plain


    so no surprise you can download the 100MB file in a few seconds, even from a slow home dsl line. Real transfer is just a few MB. I guess LEB admins/posters should check those tricks too. And ban the host doing the http to https redirect and serving a gzipped version of a compressible test file.

  • shovenoseshovenose Member, Host Rep

    Interest, I would not have thought of this.
    Except now it would be pointless given that we all know to avoid it.

  • zachfedorazachfedora

    @marrco Jesus, that file downloaded in less than a second on a 30Mbps cable connection here

  • pubcrawlerpubcrawler Banned

    @rds100 Ouch! What a find.

    Imagine that, a major CDN playing a game, trickery.

    I was lazy in not testing their file sooner. Long suspected they were doing something wrong to pull off speeds I sometime saw (like exceeding actual download bandwidth speed by 2X).

    So I just pulled the Cachefly 100mb.test file. Original size in bytes: 104857600

    Then gzipped it the standard run of mill way:

    gzip 100mb.test

    Resulting file size: 4587886

    Meaning it compressed down to 4.3%. The other 95%+ is total empty space or duplicate waste.

    Cachefly should be avoided for this sort of fraud. A CDN should be doing what it can to optimize files. Compressing them when they enter the CDN or at least before they get shipped to end users. A file like this should never be used for a speed test and is idiotic for it to be served by a so called CDN.

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