Add "Exclude Speedtest Servers" configuration option

[nwh3365]

Is your feature request related to a problem?
No errors are being produced, but from practical data accuracy perspective it is an issue.

Please describe.
There is a particular Speedtest server that is automatically selected as the best server for testing about 15% of the time. This server is consistently, and significantly slower than all other servers that have been selected for testing. The end result is that the Dashboard indicates significant fluctuations in download/upload speeds (i.e., whenever this particular server is selected for the test). In reality there isn't a performance issue with my Internet connection, but rather with that specific Speedtest server. I don't currently use thresholds for notifications, however this situation could potentially trigger notifications that seem to indicate an issue when in fact no real issue exists.

Describe the solution you'd like
In short, I would like to be able to exclude such servers from testing.

I'm thinking in terms of a configuration option, "Exclude Speedtest Servers", that allows me to specify a list of servers to be excluded from testing. When a server is selected as the best server, the exclude list is checked to see if the server appears on the list. If it does, the next best server is selected and the exclusion check repeated until a server is found that is not on the exclude list.

I think it would be easiest to specify servers to be excluded by the server ID number since this is unique and readily available in the results display. Either enter the server ID number directly, or for better validity checking, display a pulldown selection box that is populated with all of the unique server IDs (with corresponding names as a visual verification) that appear in the results table (the list probably wouldn't be that long; my database only has 11 unique servers).

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[fischerphilipp]

Huge +1 on this request. I currently constantly get threshold breach notifications because for whatever reason in ~90% of the cases „23M GmbH“ is chosen as server and at minimum 3 times per day only gets around 5 Mbps of a maximum 50 Upload.
I already adjusted timing of the speedtests to avoid them running at the top of the hour.

[alexjustesen]

I'll be honest with you on the little bit i've looked into this, it probably won't happen...

It'll be likely we'll have to rely on a specified list of servers (aka SPEEDTEST_SERVERS), this is because if a server ID is not passed to the speedtest cli it chooses a random server and just starts the test. Based on what the cli returns there is a limited amount of configurations we can pass it.

# speedtest --help
Speedtest by Ookla is the official command line client for testing the speed and performance of your internet connection.

Version: speedtest 1.2.0.84

Usage: speedtest [<options>]
  -h, --help                        Print usage information
  -V, --version                     Print version number
  -L, --servers                     List nearest servers
  -s, --server-id=#                 Specify a server from the server list using its id
  -I, --interface=ARG               Attempt to bind to the specified interface when connecting to servers
  -i, --ip=ARG                      Attempt to bind to the specified IP address when connecting to servers
  -o, --host=ARG                    Specify a server, from the server list, using its host's fully qualified domain name
  -p, --progress=yes|no             Enable or disable progress bar (Note: only available for 'human-readable'
                                    or 'json' and defaults to yes when interactive)
  -P, --precision=#                 Number of decimals to use (0-8, default=2)
  -f, --format=ARG                  Output format (see below for valid formats)
      --progress-update-interval=#  Progress update interval (100-1000 milliseconds)
  -u, --unit[=ARG]                  Output unit for displaying speeds (Note: this is only applicable
                                    for ‘human-readable’ output format and the default unit is Mbps)
  -a                                Shortcut for [-u auto-decimal-bits]
  -A                                Shortcut for [-u auto-decimal-bytes]
  -b                                Shortcut for [-u auto-binary-bits]
  -B                                Shortcut for [-u auto-binary-bytes]
      --selection-details           Show server selection details
      --ca-certificate=ARG          CA Certificate bundle path
  -v                                Logging verbosity. Specify multiple times for higher verbosity
      --output-header               Show output header for CSV and TSV formats

 Valid output formats: human-readable (default), csv, tsv, json, jsonl, json-pretty

 Machine readable formats (csv, tsv, json, jsonl, json-pretty) use bytes as the unit of measure with max precision

 Valid units for [-u] flag: 
   Decimal prefix, bits per second:  bps, kbps, Mbps, Gbps
   Decimal prefix, bytes per second: B/s, kB/s, MB/s, GB/s
   Binary prefix, bits per second:   kibps, Mibps, Gibps
   Binary prefix, bytes per second:  kiB/s, MiB/s, GiB/s
   Auto-scaled prefix: auto-binary-bits, auto-binary-bytes, auto-decimal-bits, auto-decimal-bytes

[nwh3365]

I think this should be reasonably easy to implement.

speedtest -L returns a list of the ten closest servers:

speedtest -L
Closest servers:

    ID  Name                           Location             Country
==============================================================================
  8862  CenturyLink                    Denver, CO           United States
 47683  NextLight                      Denver, CO           United States
 16797  Nitel                          Denver, CO           United States
 24079  ALLO - Denver                  Denver, CO           United States
 51010  Highline                       Denver, CO           United States
 23628  Whitesky Communications LLC    Denver, CO           United States
 10051  Comcast                        Denver, CO           United States
 18847  Xiber LLC                      Denver, CO           United States
  9912  fdcservers.net                 Denver, CO           United States
 23971  Starry, Inc.                   Denver, CO           United States
 20818  Verso Networks                 Denver, CO           United States

As you mentioned, when you run speedtest without specifying a server, it picks one on it's own. I had assumed (but cannot confirm) the servers are listed in order of closeness (i.e., the first one listed is the closest). In the limited testing I've done, when I didn't specify a server, it always picked the first one in the list. I have seen all of these servers appear in the Speedtest Tracker results, but an analysis of the results table indicates a very strong preference for one of the entries, which leads me to believe speedtest-cli is probably using the first entry in the list if you don't specify a particular server.

Count	Pct	ID	Name
1261	54%	8862	CenturyLink	
303	13%	47683	NextLight	
254	11%	51010	Highline	
221	10%	24079	ALLO - Denver	
136	6%	18847	Xiber LLC	
57	2%	23971	Starry, Inc.	
34	1%	20818	Verso Networks	
17	1%	23628	Whitesky Communications LLC	
16	1%	9912	fdcservers.net	
14	1%	14861	Aerux Broadband	
4	0%	10051	Comcast	
---------------------------------------------------				
2317	100%			

Since the Server ID is provided in the first column, you should be able to run speedtest -L, parse out the list of Server IDs, filter out the ones that are on the exclude list, then pick the first one from the list that remains and run speedtest -s ServerID.

Prior to finding Speedtest Tracker I used a shell script that basically worked like this. While it accomplished the task of logging recurring speedtest results so I could see changes over time, it didn't produce any of the nice charts that Speedtest Tracker does. I could do about any type of analysis I wanted, but it was a manual process. Speedtest Tracker is a huge improvement over that!

[alexjustesen]

Good call on the servers first, I was thinking about it from a purely speedtest cli perspective when running a test.

In #1464 (which is coming in 0.20.0 I introduced a new artisan app:ookla-list-servers command to get the maximum servers from their API which happens to bump it up to 20.

In the call I'm taking the response which is in json and parsing it into a collection for easy display in the terminal, we could absolutely expand on this pattern and no longer rely on the speedtest cli to choose our server behind the scenes and instead get our list first and prune out anything we don't want then choose the random one.

[BronsonZ]

Just wanted to add another big +1 to this feature request. I have a similar problem with 1-2 particular servers (which are chosen quite often) being much slower than all the others, making them clear outliers affecting the averages.

[alexjustesen]

For those following this thread, if you leave the cli to select it's own server there is no way to tell it to avoid certain servers. This is a limitation of Ookla's CLI and not Speedtest Tracker.

👉 That being said I STRONGLY recommend you add your preferred servers to the server list so you know you're using the ones you want.

[alexjustesen]

Closing as there is no way to tell the CLI not to use a server.

[nwh3365]

If you don't want to implement this, that is your choice and that's fine, but please don't imply that it's not possible.

While your statement is technically correct, "there is no way to tell the CLI not to use a server", there is a simple workaround to this limitation which I described above on June 6; in short, get the list of closest servers from the CLI, filter out the excluded servers, then pick the first one and tell the CLI to use it. Other software does this and in my experience it works well. An additional benefit of specifying servers to exclude vs specifying servers to use is that Speedtest-Tracker would automatically select the best servers as the list of available servers changes, while still excluding the undesirable ones.

[alexjustesen]

It is possible but at this time my recommendation is to view the closest list and choose the servers you wish to use.

[alexjustesen]

Back on the table in #1877