[Enhancement] Show speed of public instances

[wooster0]

Is your enhancement request related to a problem? Please describe.

https://redirect.invidious.io/ lists public instances of the site sorted by health but even sites with 100% health can sometimes be very slow compared to other instances. Even if you select the top instance you can end up with a slow one.

Describe the solution you'd like

I wish it would sort by health and speed of the site. There should be another column indicating how fast the site runs and how well it plays and loads videos. Some instances take longer than others to load videos. Health only seems to refer to how little the site crashes (?).

Describe alternatives you've considered

Let the user have to test all kinds of instances before they might find one that they find fast enough. Personally I remember yewtu.be to have an acceptable speed so I usually choose that but there might be better ones.

[SamantazFox]

"instance health" is basically its uptime. We're using a service called uptime robot for that. The instance homepage is fetched by UR every now and then, and if the server replies in a reasonnible time, it's all good. The uptime is simply the percentage of requests the server replied to (100% means the server was always responding, and 0% means that someone probably pulled the plug of the server ^^).

Speed is more complex, as it depends on the server load, your connection, and the server's connection to youtube.

One important note: many public instances are perfectly capable of handling the traffic. There are known slowdown issues, which doesn't depend on instances; Youtube is deliberately throttling the speed of videos when the traffic is not coming from their own client. Check iv-org/invidious#2194 for more details.

[jonas-w]

Maybe adding a sort by ping method? Uptimerobot also measures the ping of the instances.
It's not exactly the speed, but this could be a compromise.

Via this api call (example for api.invidous.io) : https://stats.uptimerobot.com/api/getMonitor/89VnzSKAn?m=786990690
the ping/response time can be retrieved.

[unixfox]

Maybe adding a sort by ping method? Uptimerobot also measures the ping of the instances. It's not exactly the speed, but this could be a compromise.

Via this api call (example for api.invidous.io) : stats.uptimerobot.com/api/getMonitor/89VnzSKAn?m=786990690 the ping/response time can be retrieved.

Do note that it's response times from the USA, so just because the response time is high doesn't mean that it will be high for you depending on your location.
For example, api.invidous.io may have a high response time because it's hosted in europe while vid.puffyan.us not because it's hosted in the USA. But for an european vid.puffyan.us may have a higher reponse time than api.invidous.io.

[unixfox]

You can now get more "speed" info about each instance thank to updown.io. Here is an example: https://updown.io/so3l

Just click on the uptime link of the instance here: https://api.invidious.io/

Closing