Anybody who wants to test their
connection speed can easily do so from a speed test web site — but that isn’t
very geeky. Here’s how to do a test from the terminal prompt instead.
(Note: If you are using
Windows, you’ll want to either have Cygwin installed, or have a copy
of curl or wget installed. On the Mac you can use curl, but if you prefer wget,
you’ll need to install that.)
Testing Internet Connection Speed with Curl
This is pretty simple. Just copy
and paste the following command:
curl -o
/dev/null http://speedtest.sea01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip
The first thing to point out is
that we’re using a test file from Softlayer, but if your connection is
really fast, you might want to use a larger file from Thinkbroadband to
properly test. Secondly, that -o switch is the lower case form of the
letter O. It’s not a zero, and if you omit it, your terminal will turn into
crazyville since curl will try to output to the screen — it’s also important
because we’re outputting the file to /dev/null, which means it’ll basically be
automatically deleted.
Testing Internet Connection Speed with Wget
If you prefer using wget, or that
is what you have installed, the switch is the same. That is a capital letter
“o” and it sends the output straight to null, so you don’t have any files to
delete.
wget -O /dev/null
http://speedtest.sea01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip
This file is only 100 MB, so if you
have a really fast connection, this isn’t going to work very well, and you’ll
want to find a bigger file to download from the site linked above.
0 comments:
Post a Comment