My speed test said 500 Mbps. Games still lagged. So I built a site that shows where the lag is

yt1988 · 2:07AM

Last month my internet felt broken.

Game ping jumped all over the place. On video calls people said my voice kept cutting out. Cloning a repo from GitHub took long enough to make lunch.

I called my ISP. The support agent had the script ready: "Could you run a speed test first?"

I did. 500 Mbps, the full plan.

"Then your connection is fine."

The thing is, bandwidth was never my problem. My problem was the wait after every click, and speed tests don't measure that.

Ping? Browsers can't send it, and plenty of services don't answer it anyway. "What's my IP" sites? You get one IP address and that's the end of it.

I couldn't find a tool that did what I wanted, so I wrote one.

👉 https://1ms.dog

Hit Start and a shiba runs off from your browser to fetch a ball from 40+ services you actually use: video, gaming, social, dev tools, AI, CDNs, plus the sites people use most in your region. The higher the latency, the farther the ball flies, so you can see at a glance what's close and what's far.

It tells you where the problem is, not just how many ms

This is the part I wanted most. It scores local favorites and global services separately:

Local fast, global slow: the problem is the route out of your region. Switching Wi‑Fi won't help.
Local slow too: don't blame your ISP just yet. Restart the router, or move closer to it.
Both fast: congrats, your connection is fine. The slowness is on the other end.

Under that you get a rating for gaming, video calls, streaming, AI tools and dev tools. Click "Video calls" and the services that rating is based on light up in the chart, so each rating shows what it's based on.

Your connection may have more than one exit

Most people don't know this: your IPv4 and IPv6 traffic can take two completely different paths out to the internet. Office networks and dual-line setups often have several exits too.

The page asks a handful of lookup services in different places at once and lists every exit it finds: city, provider and AS number. Hover the little "!" to see which lookups spotted it.

The bug that surprised me

When I first built it, one service always came back at 700+ ms. I assumed my line was terrible.

It turned out the test URL hit that company's application server. The server spent 400+ ms on its own work, then redirected me to a bot-check page.

I wasn't measuring my network. I was measuring how long their backend took to do its job.

So I switched every test URL to one that the provider's nearest edge server answers by itself. That service dropped from 700 ms to just over 100. An automated check now runs every day, so if a provider quietly changes an endpoint, I know the next morning.

A few more things

Test one service: 1ms.dog/github/ tests only GitHub, 10 times in a row: median, first-connection time, and how much it jitters
Test one category: 1ms.dog/game/ tests only gaming. Run it before a match
Share it: get an image or a link, with no IP address in it, safe to post anywhere
Your data stays with you: every request goes straight from your browser. The site itself is a pile of static files and never learns what you tested
Light on requests: the home page waits for you to press Start. If you'd rather it ran on open, flip "Test when the page opens" and it remembers
Easter egg: tap the dog 5 times fast 🐕