- What do host / srflx / relay candidates mean?
- They're the addresses WebRTC can try: host = your local interface addresses (mDNS-obscured in modern browsers), srflx = your public address as seen by a STUN server (its presence means your NAT can be traversed), relay = an address on a TURN server that forwards traffic when direct paths fail. A healthy setup shows host + srflx; relay appears only when you configure TURN.
- What is a symmetric NAT and why does it break P2P?
- A symmetric NAT assigns a different public port for every destination you talk to, so the port a STUN server observed is useless to the actual peer — hole punching fails. The tool detects this by comparing mappings from two STUN servers: different ports → symmetric. Two symmetric-NAT peers essentially always need a TURN relay.
- Why does my TURN server return no relay candidates?
- The validator separates the causes: a 401/credential failure (wrong username/password or an expired time-limited credential), an allocation failure (server unreachable — firewall blocking the port, or wrong port/transport), or DNS failure on the hostname. Test UDP, TCP and TLS separately — corporate networks often allow only turns: on 443.
- Is this a speed test of my internet connection?
- No — and the page says so honestly. The throughput numbers measure the WebRTC path: your machine's WebRTC stack (loopback), your TURN server's capacity (relay-forced), or a specific peer-to-peer link. A general download/upload speed test needs dedicated test servers, which a serverless site can't honestly provide.
- What does the two-browser test do?
- It builds a real WebRTC connection between two devices without any signaling server: one side creates an offer as a compressed text blob, you send it over any messenger, the other side pastes it back an answer, and the connection comes up — then live stats show whether you're direct or relayed, round-trip time, bitrate and packet loss. It's both a demo of how WebRTC signaling works and a genuine connectivity test between two real networks.