People will be scared away by that limit, and as you may know, not many like to wait. So unless the routing issues can get fixed without resorting to extreme measures, I'd stay away from such an idea.

this would probably entail a whole and complete rewrite of the whole testing script. but what the hell.
reserve 95mbit of the 100 mbit for the test, maybe 15 of that again for the upload.

let the test run as long as there is at least 10 mbit available for the dl test and 2 for the upload. that way many small timers can test simultaneous, only if several fast ones are dl/ing will the script have to delay a few seconds before it starts the queued clients. the values would have to be monitored and tweaked, but 10mbit avail for down sounds like a good value to ensure that even a fast link like RTB's can stretch it's legs.

that would also prevent getting 30 second waits, since the fast links do even the 3 meg test in 10 seconds or less, freeing the bandwidth up quickly. maybe limit number of tests per ip to 5 a day or so or maybe 30 in a week, so someone doing a lot of tweaking can run a hoopload of tests and then just has to wait a bit for his quota to fill up again.

from the faq:




and i don't think, otherwise there is a lot of people with slow connects not taking up much bandwidth, that the number of users shown includes all those people reading/posting on the forum.

only when someone throws down a challenge do they all go to test at the same time, and then get borked results. for my views on adding a short delay, dynamic, at the beginning of the test if necessary, see previous post.

 

it ain't the server that's the problem. it's the network linkup.

wonder CA3le could have them drop a giggabit card in, but then i kind of doubt the site operator would be thrilled at the idea of blasting 1/12th of his total bandwidth with /gasp/ essentially useless speedtest data.

 

not really all that surprising. i dl at about 2800 Kbps. even the 3 meg test takes me less than 11 seconds to complete.
that's why the server side should monitor all running tests and delay the start of a test for a few seconds if there happens to be a spike. most people would probably not even reall notice a delay of a few seconds, and the advantage to queing them like this would be that everyone is guaranteed a fat chunk of bandwidth for his/her test.
the accuracy would be much improved as a result, making sure test results are reproducable and the unknown factor of <was the link bottlenecked when i tested or did my tweaking bork mine> would be eliminated.

i for one would be more than happy to wait a few seconds for other testers to finish so i could run a clean test. and that would then be an even better thing to advertise with. testmy.net has this awesome loadbalancing so even though it's the most F#@&ing popular site on the planet everyone gets a fair shot at testing.

Lmfao!!   

Theirs the testmy quote of 2005!

"20 Guests, 8 Users"

Im one of the 28 actualy "on the site" so i dont think i count :p Theirs at least 100 users testing lol. They dont go to  the testmy homepage and say "omg which should i click  now?! O_O "