Google Fiber

billy2

I am the 1st guy on my block to hook up to Google Fiber.

I'm not sure having the fastest cloud hookup matters with cad.onshape.com. My new Google fiber is faster than Att fiber, but it doesn't seem to make a difference with onshape. My hookup with rustyshed.com is affected by the connection but I'm not seeing the same results when hooking up to onshape.

I had Google run the fiber into my office vs. a utility closet in the back of the house where the Att router is located. This makes good sense if you want a fast connection. I'm now cabled into the main router.

The google guy explained the 1st router in any home network will be much faster than any subsequent extended or mesh type router. I'm running wifi 5 which apparently is using bluetooth for the slave routers and is really slow compared to the main router. Wifi 6 is better, and can perform 1gig download speeds over wifi, but the main router will always outperform it's slaves.

Having a faster internet connection doesn't seem to affect load times with onshape. Super fiber speeds and which router you're hooking up to doesn't seem to speed up onshape's performance.

So..... let's cut out all the middleman software.

Speed testing rustyshed.com results are about the same as an actual ping. It's because my server just sends the time stamp back and the browser computes the difference in time. Not much to do. Pinging cad.onshape.com gives an 8ms response time but the reported ping rate in the diagnostics always gives 70ms. I'm not sure the diagnostic time is a true ping and is probably more of a speed test showing time to cascade through load balancers and other cloud servers before reaching the one you're actually talking to.

Why can I ping cad.onshape.com and get a great response time 8ms and yet when I run diagnostics I get 70ms?

Anyway, the moral of this post, your connect speed to onshape doesn't really matter.

I'm not complaining, it's still faster than most CAD systems loading off of a corporate network drive. I was just hoping to see some improvements when using faster connection speeds and it makes me wonder if onshape is throttling response times trying to balance traffic? The response time from onshape is the same using all these different connecting schemes which makes no sense to me.






So let's run some speed tests

Google fiber connected by a cable

ping time 2ms

Google fiber wifi connected to main wifi mesh router:

ping time 6ms

Google fiber wifi connected to 2nd wifi mesh router

ping time 23ms

I did not hook a cable up to the Att router because it's in the back of house, it's not accessible or I'm too lazy.

Att fiber main wifi router

ping time 20ms

Att fiber wifi extender

ping time 102ms

Let's run rustyshed speed tests

google fiber cable

ping time 40ms

google fiber 1st wifi mesh 

ping time 51ms

Att fiber 1st wifi

ping time 60ms

Let's ping the servers

ping rustyshed.com

ping time 41ms


ping cad.onshape.com

ping time 8ms


onshape diagnostic ping time

ping time 70ms


My findings, your connection speed doesn't really matter. 

NeilCooke

Hi Billy, connection speed does affect document opening times because it’s pure data that’s coming down the pipe. Pinging cad.onshape.com is not a true reflection as it’s the round trip time to the load balancers. The ping time in the Performance Panel is the latency over the websocket to the modelling server and is a better indication of “lag” while using Onshape. 

MichaelPascoe

@billy2, I wonder what the Benchmark results would look like with your ultra fast internet!

billy2

I have the same issue with my site as my speed time stamp is routed through a socket also. With the ping, it has to establish a connection and send/recieve the ping. That's why my site is faster than the ping, the connection is already open using a socket.

A faster connection speed will only help the speed to the server, in the case of Onshape, that's 8ms and halve that is 4ms which is probably the actual speed increase that I'm really seeing. You can't notice this increase in performance.

Rustyshed.com only has one server in California so it's ping rate is higher at 40ms. For you in England it's even a greater time to reach my site. A faster connection would help a poorly distributed web application like my site.

I'll see if I can figure out a benchmark for downloading a large project. I was playing around with clearing out the cache and then reloading. The difference wasn't noticeable without a stopwatch handy. I tend to lose track of things after about 10 seconds and things that long are just too long.  

I'm guessing the take-away from this is that Onshape works well with a crappy connection which we already knew.

billy2

Does anyone know of a large public assembly that can be used to test speeds? Anyone could open the document and time how long it takes to load. 

I'm guessing we should also "ping cad.onshape.com" so we know what we're dealing with. You can ping running terminal on a mac or powershell on a pc. This will tell us how far the replicated amazon server is located from your computer.