Down Tester Creates Custom Speed Tests
Windows only: For a quick and dirty assessment of your connection speed it’s tough to beat sites like Speedtest.net, but what if you want to make a custom list of remote locations?
If you need or want a finer degree of control over the speed tests you conduct, Down Tester is a customisable speed tester. You specify which remote files it downloads for its test, how long it will download each file, and what kind of connection it forms with the remote host. For our test we selected three popular Linux distributions and downloaded 20 seconds worth of each .ISO file. As you can see from the screen shot with just three remote locations there was quite a variety in download speed, the more files you add the more accurate a picture of your connection Down Tester creates. The application is tiny, under 50k, and portable. Down Tester is freeware, Windows only.
Down Tester [via gHacks]
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
I have Comcast at my house and as much as I hate them, I have a 25Mbit down/4Mbit up average connection, and we pay for a basic home line. I generally use speedtest.net from CT to a NJ server at about 22ms.
I'll give this a try, as I am an avid seeder on a couple retro gaming sites.
@dragonskin: What country is that?
Also, America is actually low on the list of developed countries in terms of average bandwidth across the country. Japan and Korea are one and two. And, funnily enough, Poland has a higher average than the U.S.
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My housemates and I pay for Comcast Business edition which is about $100 a month, 16 Mbit down advertised (~30 Mbit actual) and 4 Mbit up advertised (about 8 Mbit actual). But we went for the business edition because it has no bandwidth cap, since everyone in my house is an IT major in college, we go through about a Terabyte per month.
cha0tic
You guys should count your blessings. My maximum download speed is 50 KBps. The fastest connection available for home users is a 4Mb connections and that costs 180$ a month which is quite a lot here where the average salary of a person is like 400$ a month.
dragonskin
Unfortunely, you will never get your presumed download on one session. That's what Downthemall exists, it opens 5 concurrent connections to enable the speed that it gets, and that's why torrents can reach really nice dl speeds as well.
Doron Ben Chaim
Way to keep the cable companies humble! I think im gonna test to see if they are really giving me what we paid for now! And being portanble, I'll probably have to put this on my computer help flash disk (so I can help people with computers, since im the geek of our family)
@tok3n ninja; stole your underwear: What's the point if they cap you at 250gb?
orlo
@tok3n ninja; stole your underwear:
Likewise, as much as I complain about comcast, the speed I get from them vs what I pay just can't be beat. Even two years ago I was consistently hitting 18-22 mbps with their most basic cable package, before they were even advertising 6mbps.
@Doron Ben Chaim: Never? My ISP offers a 1.4 MB zip file for speed testing. I got 705 KB/s with DownTester, but only 688 KB/s with DownThemAll.
Perhaps DownTester is also opening concurrent sessions.
@orlo: If you learn to be responsible with Bittorrent down/uploading you'll never have a problem with caps. And it beats the hell out of the caps on other ISPs.
@Adam: This goes in my toolbox to.
ssj4Gogeta
Very good utility to check network bandwidth i think. It will should utilization bandwidth as well as uploading speed.
There is one question is it save all logs of network utilization?