Comments on: Our Honest Mistake

By: Per Wiklander

Per Wiklander — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:19:04 +0000

If it actually was a gziped file (and not just a file of 500 MB of zeros), then why did the compression in the transfer protocol make a difference? Shouldn’t the file already be compressed as much as possible?

By: L

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:18:08 +0000

I’m surprised it’s even possible to make a 500 MB file by gzipping zeros.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:00:28 +0000

You guys use Apache on the lilypad.singlehop.com server, so you could just do a simple mod_rewrite exception on the download test file to override the SSL requirement.

Still, point taken, and glad to see that you guys are public in owning up to it. That makes a huge difference to customers and critics alike.

By: kswan

kswan — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:57:40 +0000

This was a simple oversight. We decided to upload the files to leap.singlehop.com, which hosts our customer interface, but also forces SSL’s for obvious reasons.

Even without SSL, the old download speed was misleading, but now that we’ve changed the contents everything is smooth sailing

By: mark

mark — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:21:07 +0000

Great to see you guys answering this on your public blog. The difference between /dev/urandom and /dev/zero makes sense. But, some people said that the compression was due to using SSL to serve the test file. Why would you choose to serve the test file with SSL, which would make it slower to download due to processing required on the server and client?