Social Media Test Suite
The social media test suite measures the round-trip latency and reachability of a selection of major social media services, accounting for different endpoints that the social media service may use for different content types.
A single social media site can use a variety of endpoints for different content types (e.g. audio, video) and different activities (downloading and uploading). For example, Facebook uses a different set of servers when allowing users to download videos versus upload videos. This test captures round-trip latency to all of the supported combinations.
Available Social Media Tests
Facebook
Facebook Messenger
Instagram
Instagram Messenger
WhatsApp
Snapchat
X (formerly Twitter)
Media Types Supported
The following table summarizes the different platforms and media types that our test supports (where Y = supported and n = not supported):
Service | Download Text | Download Image | Download Video | Download Audio | Upload Text | Upload Image | Upload Video | Upload Audio |
Facebook App | Y | Y | Y | n | Y | Y | Y | n |
Facebook Messenger | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Instagram App | n | Y | Y | n | n | Y | Y | n |
Instagram Messenger | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | |
Snapchat | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
X | Y | Y | Y | n | Y | Y | Y | n |
Lack of support for a particular combination is due to the social media service itself not supporting certain content types. For example, the main Facebook app does not support downloading or uploading audio clips, but the Messenger app does.
Note that we have split Instagram into two separate apps, even though they are delivered to the user as a single smartphone app. This is due to the private messaging feature within the Instagram app supporting different functionality that the main part of the app does not. Moreover, the private messaging feature of the Instagram app uses different endpoints to the main part of the app.
Social Media Test Targets
For each social media service, we determine the endpoints to test against by performing a traffic analysis of how their Android and iOS apps behaved. All apps, except for Facebook and Instagram, use a static set of endpoints. For example, X uses api.twitter.com for most operations. Of course, this does not prevent X from geographically load-balancing api.twitter.com via any cast- or DNS-based load-balancing, but all clients use this single hostname. Facebook and Instagram make use of the Facebook "FNA" (Facebook Network Appliance) caches for retrieval of image and video content. Facebook FNA caches are the on-premises caches that Facebook provides to large ISPs, much like Google does with GGC (Google Global Cache) or Netflix does with OCA (Open Connect Appliances). We use a DNS lookup to the Facebook homepage which provides us with the cache hostname from Meta. The cache hostname also gets a DNS lookup. The resulting IP address is measured with ICMP.
Additionally, the latency measurement mechanism can vary for some social media sites too. All services, with the exception of Snapchat, currently use ICMP to measure round-trip latency. For Snapchat we use HTTP time-to-first-byte because they front all of their API servers (currently hosted in the US) with Amazon's CloudFront reverse proxy, which is distributed globally. To just measure round-trip time to their CloudFront hostname would misrepresent the end-to-end latency that a user really experiences.
The social media test fully supports IPv4 and IPv6. It may optionally be run with DNS resolution performed via DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS, instead of using the default system resolver.
Social Media Test Example
While comparing different social media services in our study Measuring Broadband New Zealand, we discovered that latency to Snapchat's image servers - which are hosted in the United States - are around four tenths of a second on average. This would introduce noticeably slower performance compared to other chat services such as Whatsapp or Facebook/Instagram Messenger.
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