How to test the speed of an internet connection?

I was experiencing frequent disconnections of my internet link at home. These were very short but long enough to disturb one service I am using. So I decided to check if my internet provider was correct and doing his job correctly.

My first idea was that there must exists free (as in free speech) and simple command-line tools to test the connection speed under GNU/Linux. As I am not a specialist, I tried to find such tools on the internet but didn’t find any (if you have one, please feel free to share it with me). So I decided to write my own set of scripts in Perl.

For the moment, results are somewhat convincing (but the “ping” command does not reflect exactly the connection speed) but they can already be used 🙂

Example of results (image is reduced)

You can find scripts, how to do it and work in progress here.

2 thoughts on “How to test the speed of an internet connection?”

  2. Thanks, Alexandre, for the link. SmokePing is obviously much more powerfull than what I wrote: works like a daemon process, use of CGI, use of RRDtool, “smart” alarms, support of dynamic IP, plugins, … It was not my initial goal when I started my script: I just wanted something simple the regular user can launch and stop at will. But, of course, I *need* to install SmokePing in order to check my connection 🙂

Comments are closed.