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macOS Monterey's new network quality tool is surprisingly good
- unilynx 5y agoToo bad it doesn't have a -4/-6 option. I was just debugging some connectivity issues which seem to happen only to ipv6
- SquibblesRedux 5y agoCan anyone speak to "responsiveness?" Is this essentially the inverse of latency?
- lelandbatey 5y agoInterestingly, I'm having serious problems just loading the web page; visiting the page gets me into a redirect loop, visible in cURL like so: $ curl -v --http1.1 https://danpetrov.xyz/macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html > GET /macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html HTTP/1.1 > Host: danpetrov.xyz > User-Agent: curl/7.68.0 > Accept: */* < HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently < location: https://danpetrov.xyz/macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html It's returning a 'location' that's the same as the source, leading to me never seeing the actual page. EDIT: It's back now, working and visible.
- m0dest 5y agoThis is awesome. I hope the client code will be included in the Apple's open source repository [1] after they update it for Monterey. It's hard to fully rely on a test without seeing its implementation, especially the responsiveness portion. [1] https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/
- divbzero 5y agoThis is great. I’ve encountered connectivity issues the past couple weeks and have been looking for tools like this. Are there similar tools for assessing WiFi quality and bandwidth?
- dtaht 5y agoOver here we tuned up virgin media fiber to have the least latency under normal working conditions yet seen, using sqm and the sch_cake algorithm. Pretty graphs here: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/virgin-media-discussion-thread.17701788/page-1120 https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/virgin-media-discu... I don't know what rpm score that network would get as yet.
- kangaroozach 5y agoDoes it separate WiFi from internet? Seems most people don’t even understand the difference. You could have strong internet but poor WiFi in a certain spot or for a certain time.
- blakesterz 5y agoThis is a neat little tool. I had no idea that was hiding in there. Anyone have any other little hidden gems on MacOS?
- handrous 5y agoThere are tons of excellent pieces of Apple software that come with iOS[EDIT macOS, that is] (or are free to download). Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem. One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.
- blakesterz 5y agoOh wow, how have I never noticed the Color Meter!? Thanks for pointing to that!
- sgspace 5y agoI used to use sip. Didn’t realize Apple made a native one. Thanks!
- slmjkdbtl 5y agoI agree Preview.app is amazing. It's fast, has a lot of features and not bloated at all. However I think recent built-in apps are so bad almost unusable (like Music.app and TV.app), Preview's elegance seems to be a lost art in Apple.
- fingerlocks 5y agoWhat’s wrong with the AppleTV app? Perf is fine. UI/X is par with HBOMax, Disney+. Definitely better than Prime Video.
- qalmakka 5y agoWho thought naming a CLI tool with a camel case name was acceptable? Why isn't there a law against that?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- m_st 5y agoSlightly OT, but I'd like to express my astonishment about a positive article about a new tool making it to the front page. Somehow these days it's always rants about new stuff. Nice and short read.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoAren't you kind of ranting about rants? And am I ranting about you ranting about rants? :)
- ask_b123 5y agoI'd say rants are a tad longer. :)
- josephduffy 5y agoA version of this is also available on iOS (I think since iOS 15.0), although it only shows the RPM: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212313 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212313 This tool is also mentioned in that page, albeit briefly.
- miles 5y agoAs others have commented, that capital Q is a strange choice for sure, and because so many other commands begin with "network", autocomplete is needlessly distant. But it's easy enough to set "nq" as an alias for networkQuality.
- DarthNebo 5y agoIf only they fixed the tab groups issue of recurrence despite deletion & not keeping new sites in the same tab group either...
- knoebber 5y agoYou can do `networkQuality -c` and it will output json. It would be fun to make a tiny web front end for it on localhost.
- dtaht 5y agoWe've been having regular videoconferences to discuss this concept tuesdays 9:30 AM PDT over here: https://starwrt.v.taht.net:8443/group/bufferbloat/ https://starwrt.v.taht.net:8443/group/bufferbloat/ (use any login, no password, chrome is best) There's also the "rpm" mailing list on lists.bufferbloat.net
- willswire 5y agoI cooked up a little app that has a UI front-end for these statistics. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/network-quality-test/id1596010084 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/network-quality-test/id1596010...
- screenshot 5y agoInterestingly it uses their own CDN infrastructure by default by checking https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/config https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/config for which endpoint to use.
- e_proxus 5y agoThat's also the beauty of Fast.com, that it uses the Netflix content servers as benchmark and not some ISP edge hosted Speedtest server with special priority. That gives a more realistic expectation of how Netflix, and in this case Apple downloads, will actually perform. And it can't be artificially boosted by the ISP. That being said, I assume both Netflix and Apple have very special CDNs with ISP co-located content servers in many cases so it is still not a realistic measurement of generic Internet performance (but Speedtest is even worse, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- danpetrov 5y agoThat's the thing, ideally you would perform a test for every single service that you use directly to their network. In my previous company where we were doing live broadcast, we would have speed testers pre-installed on all the hub and edge servers, so we could get realistic numbers for a specific use case (for example, requesting. a video stream from Germany).
- afavour 5y agoThere is a flip side to fast.com, though: it’s much more likely that it will encounter throttled speeds on mobile devices, since many unlimited plans keep the connection to Netflix artificially slow. Not endorsing that for a second but I was using fast.com as an absolute measure of internet speed until I realised this. But speedtest has the issues you’ve outlined too, there are very few 100% reliable options!
- Phemist 5y agoThe flip side was and I guess still is the exact reason for existence of fast.com. ISPs were throttling Netflix, so Netflix rolled out its own speed-testing service on its own infrastructure to publicly shame ISPs about the throttling. Without knowing about that background information, I suppose use of fast.com is a bit tricky.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y agoAn intercap in a command line tool? (Sounds good apart from that!)
- judge2020 5y agoJust tried running it on my (terribly inconsistent and laggy) directv/att satellite internet, and the process crashed with NSInvalidArgumentException. https://gist.github.com/judge2020/ff0279a51ed59a56aa184867c0896086 https://gist.github.com/judge2020/ff0279a51ed59a56aa184867c0... (14" MBP base model)
- js2 5y agoThe programmer either meant to use NSNull or setValue:forKey or simply forgot a nil check. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutabledictionary/1416335-setvalue https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutab... Pretty lame mistake to let slip through review and testing and a common enough error that Apple calls it out in its documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutabledictionary/1411616-setobject https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsmutab...
- ManuelKiessling 5y agoSimple! Use macOS Monterey’s new software quality tool to debug this. I’ve heard it’s surprisingly good!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- danpetrov 5y agoHuh interesting, works fine on my 2018 Intel MBP. Surprising to see a bug like this on the newest models.
- jmull 5y agoThis is a nice little addition. The UX is nicer than even the best web sites for this (assuming you're comfortable with the command line).
- mnadkvlb 5y agoI hope this improves the network stack in ipads as well. Now that apple has same cpu arch on both ipads and macs, i expect better network tools for ipads. I recently tried setting my ipad 5g as a hotspot but couldnt share the internet over the ethernet over my dock. If i could do that, it would enable the full 1+ gigabit 5g speeds that i get natively on ipad to the 2.5G port on the usb-c dock connected ethernet. I also tried tethering through usb-c which gave only 250mbps. Finally settled using wifi tethering which maxes around 600mbps. It would be great if there is possibility to share 5g over ethernet, that would blow any 5g hotspot out of water with the chipset apple have put in the ipads.
- ripperdoc 5y agoNice! A network tool I've always wanted is one that automates the investigation you have to do manually if you are experienceing "internet issues". I mean, the check list is quite straightforward but still a pretty manual process, stuff like: - Do I have the expected IP? - Is there large packet loss or latency issues hinting at connectivity issues? - Can I ping the local gateway? - Can I ping to outside network? - Is my nearest DNS responding? - Is another, remote DNS responding? - What does Downdetector or similar say about the service I'm trying? It would be nice with a one click tool that just went through this in order and gave a diagnosis.
- perryizgr8 5y agoThis is what windows network troubleshooter was meant to be. But it never seems to work.
- toast0 5y agoNeeds something about MTU too. A popular way to mess up a network is to configure it for a too large MTU and not send the ICMPs that would tell you otherwise.
- dtaht 5y agoIt's not "one click", but flent is the goto tool we use to probe networks for a multiplicity of problems. It's available for most OSes, including OSx. See flent.org.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoI have xBar plugin (formely BitBar) that pings Cloudflare: ping -c 1 -n 1.1 2>/dev/null | awk -F '/' 'END {printf "%.2f ms\n", $5}' Also your router GATEWAY=$(netstat -nr | grep '^default' | grep en0 | grep -o '[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}') ping -c 1 -n -q $GATEWAY 2>/dev/null | awk -F '/' 'END {printf "%.2f ms\n", $5}'
- zimbatm 5y agoCheck out https://github.com/ycd/dstp https://github.com/ycd/dstp . It's still pretty young but it tries to solve that problem. The author needs more feedback.