Related

Tool [NEW] Bandwidth Pricing Calculator Tool
DigitalOcean is not redirecting website address to the droplet Question Question
Why are snapshots so slow Question Question

Question

Why the vast differences in upload and download speeds?

Posted August 10, 2019 2k views
DigitalOceanNetworkingUbuntu 18.04

I recently setup a small $5 droplet in the London region. I installed speedtest-cli to test the upload and download speeds, but I saw some very different results.

Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Retrieving information for the selected server...
Hosted by Vodafone UK (Bracknell) [14.60 km]: 4.009 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 3837.55 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 4.16 Mbit/s

I tested on multiple speedtest servers but the results were basically the same, the downloads were betweeh 500-3300mb while the upload was around 4mb. Any thoughts on why the upload is so slow compared to the download?

Add a comment
MattClegg
By:
MattClegg
Add a comment

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

×
1 answer
bobbyiliev August 11, 2019

Hello,

I’ve just tested that and indeed I got the same results. Then I used the strace command to strace the process and I noticed that during the Upload tests the connections to speedtest.net were timing out.

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So my guess would be that the speedtest tool in the repository is outdated or something.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/

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Bobby

Reply Report
Submit an Answer

Related

Looking for something else?

Ask a new question Search for more help