How MeterX measures
A full test takes about twenty seconds and runs in four phases. Each one answers a different question about your line.
Where the twenty seconds go
Each bar shows the phase's share of the whole test.
- Under a second
Connect
MeterX opens a connection to the nearest Cloudflare location, or to your own server.
- 2 seconds
Ping and jitter
A run of small requests measures the delay and how much it wobbles from one request to the next. Requests that never return count as loss.
- About 9 seconds
Download
Four parallel streams fill your line for a fixed time. The slow start and the last moments are trimmed, so the figure is the steady speed.
- About 9 seconds
Upload
Three streams do the same upward while pings keep running, to catch the delay that builds under load.
Latency under load
A line can look fast and still stutter on a call while something downloads. That is bufferbloat: routers queue too much data, so every request waits in line.
MeterX keeps pinging during the download and upload and grades the worst rise above the ping at rest.
| Grade | Rise in ping under load | What you notice |
|---|---|---|
| A | 5 ms or less | Nothing, even on calls during big downloads |
| B | 30 ms or less | Almost nothing |
| C | 60 ms or less | Small hiccups in games and calls when the line is busy |
| D | 200 ms or less | Calls stutter while someone downloads |
| F | More than 200 ms | Everything lags when the line is busy |
Where it tests
- The nearest Cloudflare locationBy default, a small Cloudflare Worker answers from the location closest to you. It sends and receives test bytes and keeps nothing.
- Or your own serverRun the self-hosted server from the repository on your machine or network, and point MeterX at it in settings.
- Why results differ from other testsEach test uses its own servers, number of streams and length. MeterX uses several streams for a fixed time, which is close to how your browser loads pages and files.
- What a quality label meansExcellent needs 50 Mbps down, 20 up and under 30 ms ping. Good needs 20, 10 and under 60 ms. Fair needs 5, 2 and under 150 ms.