The need for speed

Web speed tests depend on distance from you to the test server, a server that is close will always be faster than another far away, in particular latency wise.

A good way to illustrate the difference in speed consider these two web based speedtest sites:

https://speedtest.abadcer.com/ - Compute at the Edge speed test.

• Location distributed across all Cloudflare locations, no centralized code.
• Your traffic goes back and forth from your location to the nearest Cloudflare PoP (point of presence).
• Source code: https://github.com/anabadce/cloudflare-workers/tree/main/worker-librespeed

https://abadcer.com/speedtest/ - Server based speed test.

• Location Paris, France. Code centralized in a traditional server.
• Your traffic goes back and forth between your location and the server location (server limited to 100mbps).
• Source code: https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest