Slow speed downloading from VPS (speedtest on VPS shows it as slow too)

Posted on September 7, 2022

When I set up a VPS and Apache on there and I wget a file, or download a file from a web browser, I get a speed of about 1MB/s

Whereas an internet speed test on my computer at home, shows i’m able to download at 12MB/s

Also if I try a speed test from the digitalocean server,

so, ookla commandline speed test

speedtest-cli

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration… Testing from Digital Ocean (…)… Retrieving speedtest.net server list… Selecting best server based on ping… Hosted by EGI Hosting (Santa Clara, CA) [4.38 km]: 2.584 ms Testing download speed… Download: 5274.92 Mbit/s Testing upload speed… Upload: 1931.09 Mbit/s

That’s slow, less than 1MB/s download and 0.2MB/s upload

So when i’m Downloading from the VPS it’s surprising I even manage to get 1MB/s 'cos i’d be limited by the VPS only being able to upload 0.2MB/s

My computer at home though is capable of 12MB/s

Are there digitalocean servers that would get better results from an internet speed test?

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Bobby

September 7, 2022

Hello,

I’ve recently answered the same question here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/why-the-vast-differences-in-upload-and-download-speeds

It seems to be a problem with the speedtest version that comes by default from the Ubuntu repos.

So I decided to get latest speedtest speedtest script rather than using the one available from the repository:

Get the latest version of the script:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py

Make the file executable:

chmod +x speedtest.py

Run the script:

python speedtest.py

The results were much better in this case:

Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by XILO (Maidenhead) [3.98 km]: 2.976 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 702.54 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed................................................................................................
Upload: 800.73 Mbit/s

So my guess would be that the speedtest tool in the repository is outdated or something. It is always best to use the official instructions when installing tools on your system:

https://www.speedtestserver.com/

Let me know how it goes.

Regards,

Bobby