This test location seems to be having difficulties over the past few days (takes about 10 mins for test to start even though you’re first in the queue and then it’s pretty hit or miss if it actually completes). Can someone have a look at the test node to see if something is wrong with it?
Thanks
When you DO get test results, do they look reasonable or are they also questionable? Just trying to understand the nature of the problem. I’ll reach out to Fastsoft to see if they can take a look at the actual configuration but to say I’ve had issues with the nodes physically inside of China would be an understatement. DNS and connectivity have been spotty at best (though the Jaingsu location seems to be more consistent).
When it works, they look reasonable. Although I just noticed that the Shanghai site has been removed, so maybe there was a problem?
The only weird thing I was seeing was that it would pick-up a US based CDN node, rather than an Asia based one. I did a packet capture, and noticed they were using non-china DNS lookups server (4.2.2.4 if memory serves). I couldn’t figure out if it was a problem with my CDN provider, or the way the test box was doing lookups.
The Shanghai site is being a bit “temperamental” . WebPagetest automatically hides locations that haven’t connected in the last hour and takes them offline until they start connecting again. I just sent a note to the Fastsoft team to see if they can look into it because I can’t even ping the machine right now so it seems to be down hard.
DNS in China is an interesting thing. Most of the providers end up using public DNS servers instead of their own (though I did manage to get the Jaingsu server to use a local one). When it comes back online I’ll see how the Shainghai one is configured to make sure it is at least using something close by.
CDN’s (particularly Akamai) don’t do so well at localizing traffic that goes to any of the public DNS systems that use distributed anycast servers (Google, Open DNS or the Level 3 servers - even EC2). They usually rely on mapping the IP to a geography based on tables that they maintain and they don’t seem to have a good mapping of the physical servers that power some of the more common public DNS systems. The CDN’s that use anycast on their own DNS servers usually do a better job of putting the traffic close to the user (and the VERY few that use TCP anycast for the actual servers do a MUCH better job because they don’t rely on DNS).