Measuring speeds

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Doug wrote:
> What software do you like to use to measure download speeds?

wget. I have a cron job that runs the below script periodically, and a 
logwatch filter that summarizes the min/average/max. It works by pulling 
a file from some ISP that has made said file available specifically for 
bandwidth testing. This obviously tests only download and is limited in 
accuracy due to only downloading from one server.

  -Tom


#!/bin/sh

LOG='/var/log/monitor-bandwidth.log'
TEST_FILE='http://insanepwning.net/speedtest/7MB'
REPORT='/tmp/bandwidth-report'
DATE=`date '+%F %X'`

wget --output-document=/dev/null --tries=3 $TEST_FILE > $REPORT 2>&1

RATE=`perl -ne 'm/\((\d+.\d+ KB\/s)\)/ && print "$+\n"' $REPORT`
if [ "$RATE" != "" ]; then
         echo $DATE $RATE >> $LOG
else
         ERROR=`cat $REPORT`
         echo $DATE $ERROR >> $LOG
fi