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Network Performance Testing

2 posts · May 2020 – Apr 2026

What this trail covers

Cloudflare's network performance testing capabilities have evolved to provide users with a more nuanced understanding of their internet connection quality beyond raw throughput. The Cloudflare Speed Test, built on the Network Quality API and Workers, measures metrics like throughput under realistic usage patterns, loaded and idle latency, jitter, and packet loss. It aims to translate these measurements into an Aggregated Internet Measurement (AIM) score, offering insights into how well a connection supports various use cases like streaming, gaming, and video conferencing. The test acknowledges that results include bottlenecks beyond the ISP, such as the browser and local Wi-Fi, and emphasizes that no single speed test is a definitive measure of ISP service but rather a helpful resource for assessing experience with Cloudflare's network.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Agents Week: network performance updateThis post details Cloudflare's improvement in network performance, moving from being the fastest provider in 40% of the top 1,000 networks to 60%. It explains the measurement methodology using connection time (trimean of RTTs) derived from Real User Measurements (RUM) when users encounter Cloudflare error pages. The improvements are attributed to both the deployment of new Points of Presence (PoPs) and software optimizations in connection handling, congestion windows, CPU, and memory usage. The post highlights specific gains in countries like the United States and provides comparative latency data.
  2. How does Cloudflare’s Speed Test really work?This post details the methodology behind Cloudflare's Speed Test, explaining how it differs from traditional speed tests by focusing on connection quality and realistic usage patterns rather than peak throughput saturation. It describes the use of predefined data blocks, measurement of loaded latency via empty requests during data transfer, and the inclusion of jitter and packet loss metrics. The post also introduces the Aggregated Internet Measurement (AIM) score as a user-friendly summary of connection performance across different use cases and provides examples of interpreting test results.
  3. Network Performance Update: Full Stack WeekThis post details Cloudflare's continued efforts to improve network performance, specifically highlighting an increase in networks where Cloudflare is the fastest provider (from 49% to 79% of the top 1000 networks by IPv4 addresses advertised). It provides case studies of performance improvements in Peru (manual load balancing to keep traffic within the country, reducing RTT from 240ms to 60ms) and Sri Lanka (routing traffic to local locations instead of Newark, reducing RTT from 150ms to 50ms). It also reports that Cloudflare Workers is 196% faster than Fastly's Compute@Edge based on time to first byte measurements.
  4. Test your home network performanceIntroduces speed.cloudflare.com, a new tool for network performance testing. Details the methodology for download, upload, latency, and jitter tests, including the use of progressively larger files and the 90th percentile for reporting speeds. Highlights the transparency of measurements and the privacy-preserving nature of data collection. Notes that the backend runs on Cloudflare Workers and the code is open-sourced.