[dundee] Broadband Speed Test by Command Line

[gordon dunlop]

I came across an article about using a broadband speed test using the
command line. This is good for testing the broadband speed of desktops,
devices & servers that does not have adobe flash installed, which is
required on some websites that does speed tests. I wanted to find out the
speeds of my servers, host and vm's , to test their network conductivity.

To download the software ($ represents command line mode):

$ wget -O speedtest-cli
https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py

To execute the program :

$ chmod +x speedtest-cli

To run the program:

$ ./speedtest-cli

The problem with the above running of the program is it finds the nearest
AVAILABLE server with the ping command where it could be Aberdeen,
Edinburgh, Glasgow,Newcastle,Carlisle or whatever. This is OK if your ISP
connection runs at 25 Mbit/sec or lower, but if you are on higher broadband
speeds e.g. Virgin Media, this will give you false results as the
responding servers have limiting speeds.

I found the following approximate results on my main PC for a Virgin Media
theoretical 100 Mbit/sec connection (Saturday night):

Aberdeen - 26 Mbit/sec
Edinburgh - 87 Mbit/sec
Glasgow - 66 Mbit/sec
Carlisle - 64 Mbit/sec
Newcastle - 35 Mbit/sec

So it looks like only Edinburgh (Virgin Media server ) can handle 100
Mbit/sec connections.

To find out the server ID of Edinburgh:

$ ./speedtest-cli --list | more

$ quit (to get out of list mode as there are pages & pages of servers)

This gives Edinburgh server ID of 3730, so I run the following command:

./speedtest-cli --server 3730

I found all my server network connectivity OK with speeds of 85~90 Mbit/sec.

-- 
Gordon
www.zubenel.org.uk
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