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Why the vast differences in upload and download speeds?

Posted August 10, 2019 8.2k 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?

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MattClegg
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MattClegg

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So my guess would be that the speedtest tool in the repository is outdated or something.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

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semmerket January 20, 2021

I did what was suggested and my upload speed keeps very slow. And the most bizarre thing is that occurs only when I upload files through Windows. I did the same test in my iPad, trying to upload the same big file to the server, and the upload speed was blazing fast with the same user and same internet!

Anybody knows what more can I do to solve this?

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