Pi Internet Speed Test

Why do you think its going to be any different from the PC/Laptop on the same LAN as the Pi?

Gordon

There's a command line tool in the Raspbian repositories that lets you use the Speedtest engine, called speedtest-cli. Install it with:

apt-get install speedtest-cli

as root or sudo.

I guess that on a very fast broadband, the pi's ethernet could become the limitation.

I want to make sure it is not because I have moved my web server from a Linux machine to a Pi on the same LAN.

In addition, I may be having trouble with my LAN as evidenced by a television set and couple of MythTV boxes fed by an HDHomeRun misbehaving. I'm trying to eliminate the LAN as the source of those problems.

Thanks for pointing me to speedtest-cli. The actual installation instructions are here . When I run it I get the error message "Failed to retrieve list of speedtest.net servers".

Toss the GUI nonsense and try wget to a true ftp server. For example:

ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/slackware/slackware-14.1-iso/slackware-14.1-install-d1.iso

No browser, no flash, no java, jes plain ol' bandwidth using the route of least resistence. While it's downloading, wget will give you yer true dwnld speed. Hit Ctrl-c to kill it if you don't want the slackware iso. There are other distros. I jes picked it cuz I had it bookmarked and I use this repos quite often and any iso is a long dwnld. I'm happy to get 1.2 MB/s, out here in the boonies. ;)

man wget

If pi does not have wget (I forget), use any ftp client or download the wget program.

nb

I guess he will not know, unless he can test it so he can compare it.

not sure if its flash by mybroadbandspeed.com is the one I use

Oh - it seems to be flash as well :-(

speedof.me is reported to use only HTML5.

In that case you might be more interested in testing the other way around. If your webserver has php enabled, you might want to check out

Did you do some basic troubleshooting, like ping -f or (like others suggested) some ftp-ing and scp-ing around?

In another reply, you mentioned that speedtest_cli could not find the server list. Is DNS working on your PI? Can you ping

Stick a big file on the web server and use wget to fetch it....

Use -O /dev/null to eliminate writing to SD card which may affect speeds.

You can also use iperf between 2 Pi's (although iperf is cross platform IIRC) but remember that the Pi's Ethernet while 100Mb goes via a half duplex USB interface, so the bi-directional tests iperf offers may be somewhat reduced.

FWIW: iperf between 2 Pi's on a good LAN runs more or less at full line speed. I've seen > 95Mb/sec.

Gordon

Or use get_iplayer to grab a programme. I run GiP on a Pi to a USB HDD and that will always fully saturate my ADSL line at nearly 6 Mbps.

TBH I'm not sure how testing the (restricted) WAN bandwidth is going to help diagnose possible LAN problems at 100 Mbps let alone gigabit.

That's the sort of thing you need to have running to stress a LAN.

Thanks. Both of those run using Iceweasel but I think the HTML5 processing drastically slows the test.

The WAN is 100 Mbps download but I'll be happy if the Pi can get somewhere near the 2.4 Mbps upload.

As for my second reason for the speed test I agree that a WAN test is not likely to isolate the LAN problem (if any). I was hoping that some locations on the LAN might be different from the rest and give me a clue from an easy and portable test.

I get major different results using that compared to Ookla flash tests.

Using the same test server? I also got a major difference but I assumed it was because speedof.me used a server 1000Km away and speedtest.com used a server in my city.

The distance between servers is unlikely to make much difference. Generally it's the last couple of miles that are the limitation. Fibre can make a significant difference to that of course.