Hey! There's a lot of reasons why this could be the case, so let's try to go through some of them.

1. There's a big difference between megabit and megabyte! One megabyte is the same as 8 megabit. We often use megabit when talking about network speeds (because bigger numbers look better), but we use megabyte when talking about speeds of actual downloads / uploads. So I bet that your network speed is measured in megabit, which means that the highest speed you can possibly get is actually 110 megabyte per second.

But 110 is still way more than the 10 that you mentioned, so let's keep going...

2. The next likely bottleneck is the wifi you mentioned. Even if your own wifi is not busy at all, it is possible that people using other wifi networks nearby (for example your neighbors) can slow down your wifi.

Technically, this depends on which "channel" your wifi is on, and how busy that channel is (how many other wifi networks nearby are using the same channel) -- and the amount of channels to choose from is fairly limited.

So please try using a cable instead -- both you and your friend at the same time.

3. Now we can start suspecting your ISP, and the quality of the network between you guys... It is possible that the internet route between your computers is under high load. Like wifi, this is something that can change over the day -- so if you for example notice the speed gets better late at night, then this could be it.

One thing you could try is to have your friend download just one single big file from you (and nothing else at the same time), and make a note of how fast it was -- for example 10, like you mentioned. And then afterwards, try downloading two big files at the same time. We would expect that both of those files will download at around half the previous speed, so 5 for each file -- the total speed should not be higher. But, if you are getting higher speeds than that, for example 7 and 8 (so 15 total), then that could indicate that the bottleneck is the ISP / route.

Let us know how it goes!

Cool that we figured it out :>

this is a fairly common problem, especially over long distances, and/or especially when you are connecting to servers which are running on budget plans. So I guess home connections kinda qualify for that description :p

Unfortunately I don't think you can do a lot about the actual problem... the ISP will probably say that you should pay for a business/enterprise connection or something, if you need good peering.

But! the good news is that you can usually get around it by sending data over several tcp connections instead, like we did with the multiple parallel downloads. This means that protocols like BitTorrent will be super fast. And although copyparty speaks HTTP (like most/all websites do), it has a somewhat unique upload feature which should get around the problem very well.

EDIT: Speedtest and Google Drive are much faster because they pay for premium connections, and they have a lot of servers so they're sending you to the one that's the closest to you -- and it's possible that speedtest also does the trick of using multiple connections, but i'm not sure about that part.

I suspect that if someone uploads files to your copyparty, they should get really good speeds, hopefully/probably more than Google Drive even -- would be great if you could verify that! The upload speed should go way up if they increase the "parallel uploads" to around 8 or maybe a bit more.

Downloading from copyparty, however, will only use one connection for each file. This is not a copyparty limitation; thanks to the design of http, it is the client / web-browser which has to be smart enough to download the file in several pieces. I'm not aware of any regular web browsers which do this, but "download managers" / "download accelerators" is what you want. DownThemAll used to be a very good choice, but I'm not sure if that is still the case... As for command line downloaders, aria2c will get the job done.

I'll take a look and see what I can find, been a while since I looked into this :>