NDT-DEV email list created

[Richard Carlson <>]

Hi Nathan;

I just ran the client on my home Linux workstation.  Nice job, I'm 
pleased that NDT based on-demand testing will continue even if the face 
of growing Java JRE limitations.

While the client gave me the upload/download and RTT data, there was no 
way to dig into the test results to figure out if these numbers were 
good, bad, or mediocre.

As the original developer of the NDT code I will repeat my mantra, the 
server is collecting data that can be used to interpret the test 
results.  I agree that the majority of NDT users are not interested in 
knowing more than the basic data, but I still think that M-Lab should 
strive to educate them on the value of knowing more.

For example, the NDT server calculates how the clients selection of TCP 
window size impacts the upload and download speeds.  These are the upper 
bounds of what could be achieved over the connection.  The server also 
calculates the speed based on the Mathis formula, this is also a 
bounding condition.

I think it would be great if the display somehow showed the user where 
they fit in relation to these limits.

At a minimum, I would also like to see a button on the screen that would 
send me the test details.  Again, I know that few, if any, users 
want/need/understand this data, but the point is, they could look at it 
or send it to the IT staff when reporting a problem.

Regards;
Rich

On 12/19/2014 11:45 AM, Nathan Kinkade wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> This is my first message to this list.  I just started working with
> the Measurement Lab team at OTI a couple months ago.  One thing we're
> working on is to put together a javascript wrapper around the Flash
> NDT client to make it a bit easier and more flexible for people to
> integrate the Flash client into various sites (originally written by
> Collin Anderson [1]).  The code can be found here:
>
> https://github.com/opentechinstitute/ndt_js/
>
> And a working example can be found here:
>
> http://files.opentechinstitute.org/~kinkade/ndt_js/
>
> As most of you are probably already aware, the Flash plugin in Firefox
> and Safari on Linux and MacOS is woefully old and apparently cannot
> reliably measure throughput at higher speeds.  The current Flash NDT
> client already includes code to detect these bad Flash environments,
> however there is currently no way to communicate that (effectively) to
> javascript.  I've made a couple small changes to the flash-client
> ActionScript which just set two new variables that are then exposed to
> javascript.  One variable is simply a true/false flag to the
> javascript that the Flash client detected (or not) a bad Flash
> runtime.  The second variable is simply the prescribed message to
> display to the user when a bad runtime is detected.  If you load the
> above working example in Firefox on Linux, you should see the error.
> The patch to the flash-client ActionScript can be found here:
>
> http://files.opentechinstitute.org/~kinkade/flash-client.patch
>
> The other tiny change in the patch, which isn't really necessary, but
> perhaps useful, is to enable debugging by default, which allows
> javascript to access and possibly display, debug messages,
> facilitating development.
>
> I apologize in advance if this isn't the proper way/channel/method to
> submit patches for proposed features or bugs.  If not, then let me
> know and I'll be happy to go through the preferred process.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nathan
>
> [1] https://github.com/collina/ndt_js