Pinned Pinned On the Mac App Store

Responsiveness

A link can be fast and still be unusable for a call.

Latency measured on an idle link is nearly useless. What ruins a video call is latency under load, and the only way to know that number is to put the link under load and measure it there.

Your download figure describes how much water the pipe carries. A call cares about how long one drop waits in the queue. When a large transfer fills the buffers in your router, every small packet has to line up behind it, so the connection stays fast and the call falls apart at the same time. That is bufferbloat, and on this connection it is 53 ms of delay that only exists when the link is busy.

Pinned saturates the link on demand, probes while it is saturated, and reports the loaded figure, the idle figure, the gap between them and the round trips per minute. Four numbers, and the one that matters is the gap.

When it runs

Trigger
You press the button. That is the only way it starts.
Schedule
There is none. It never runs on its own, and never in the background.
Why
The test deliberately saturates your connection to get the number, so it is not something an app should do behind you.
Reports
Idle latency, loaded latency, bufferbloat and RPM.
The Pinned panel showing a finished responsiveness test: idle latency, latency under load, the bufferbloat difference between them, and a round-trips-per-minute figure.

The result, as the app reports it: the idle figure every other tool shows you, the figure while the link is saturated, and the difference between them, which is the number that explains the call.

What it measures

Pinned, a menu bar network monitor for Mac

The free Pinned app shows live download and upload speed in the macOS menu bar. Pinned Pro adds per-app bandwidth, data caps on your real billing cycle, alerts, responsiveness testing and usage history.