Speedtest CLI. Run speedtest on pfSense box

[fholzer]

Just my 50Cents,

It would be nice to have this Feature via GUI.
I now its better to test the Speed through the firewall and not from the firewall itself.

But in many cases i need to test it from the pfsense itself.
(no - or limited access to the clients)

Generally i would use it to test if the WAN Connection give me the 16Mbit the customer had buyed or if the connection is below 10MBit (or lower)

regards,

Franz

[pfBlense]

Just a brief update for people using pfSense 2.2+. Instead of using pkg_add you now need to do:

pkg update
pkg install python

Thanks for the post on this!!

[nikkon]

Got this on 2.2
On a 1000 Mbit/s connection i barely get 350.20 Mbit/s on my setup.
is there any way to tweak network settings and improve this?

[Zaphon]

@nikkon:

Got this on 2.2
On a 1000 Mbit/s connection i barely get 350.20 Mbit/s on my setup.
is there any way to tweak network settings and improve this?

Well as was suggested, don't run this on the box, run it behind the box.  Also, your speed through the box is going to vary greatly based on the type of NIC's you have and the speed of your CPU.  I had a computer that had a pair of Realtek nic's on the motherboard (single core box, about 6-7 years old, makes a great little router), and with gigabit I was maxing out in the 300-400Mbit range.  I bought a dual port Intel NIC and now I'm pushing in the 995Mbit range (this is tested from behind the box to a server on the other side in a lab).  However if the box is much more recent, has a nice fast CPU, your mileage may vary.

[nikkon]

in any case i tested the speed via iperf from my box to a miktorik switch and i got 1Gbit/s full
I suspect 2 things:

• ISP - they came once and tested with another machie…worked well
• pppoe performance

[luckman212]

@getrav:

…I found the speedtest code...

Wanted to thank you for posting this. Today I used this to do a remote speed test at a site where I did not have physical access to nor any remote access to a machine behind the firewall.  The vendor needed us to confirm that a speed increase had been implemented by the ISP and this was the perfect tool for this. Got the job done and saved us a few hours of travel time for what amounted to a 5 minute test.

Thank you 8)

[floz]

Thanks for this, exactly what I was looking for.

Just my little 2 cents how to get this working on pfSense 2.2 and later.

#/etc/rc.conf_mount_rw
setenv PKG_TMPDIR /root/
pkg install python27-2.7.10_1
ln -s /usr/local/bin/python2 /usr/local/bin/python
pkg_add -r http://files.pfsense.org/packages/8/All/python26-2.6.6.tbz
fetch -o /root/speedtest-cli https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py
chmod +x /root/speedtest-cli
#/etc/rc.conf_mount_ro

[doktornotor]

Or just use 2.2.5; python is already there.

$ file /usr/local/bin/python2.7
/usr/local/bin/python2.7: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (FreeBSD), dynamically linked, interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1, for FreeBSD 10.1, stripped

[ariyako]

curl -Lo speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli

nano speedtest-cli

change

#!/usr/bin/env python

to

#!/usr/local/bin/python2.7

;)

[mdmogren]

Just wanted to post this update here for others who use this tool - it is now a package and can be installed using

pkg install py27-speedtest-cli

Then just run

./usr/local/bin/speedtest-cli

[Smoothrunnings]

Is there no GUI version of this?

My ubnt USG Pro has a speed tester app on it's firewall GUI. I don't see how it's anymore complicated to get one for Pfsense.

Thanks,

[jimp]

@Smoothrunnings:

Is there no GUI version of this?

My ubnt USG Pro has a speed tester app on it's firewall GUI. I don't see how it's anymore complicated to get one for Pfsense.

Thanks,

No, because speed testing from the firewall itself is inaccurate and unreliable. We don't want to encourage people to rely on bad data. See my previous response on this thread.

[authenticx]

Actually this is a good thing to use if you suspect your switch or cabling may be contributing to a loss of bandwidth.  This would narrow the points of failure to your firewall, the connection between your firewall and gateway and the gateway itself.  If you have a large difference between what this cli test reports and what you see in a speed test from your pc you just gained valuable troubleshooting information.

[luckman212]

I agree. It can have the standard YMMV/caveat attached, but I have gotten a ton of useful information from having the speedtest_cli pkg installed on my remote units. In my testing, a C2xxxx CPU is more than capable of pulling 400-500Mbps directly with this tool. Very useful!

[icewraithuk]

I use this to keep my ISP honest, which is a trick in itself :) For those that are interested here's my hack:

Go to www.thingspeak.com and register for a free account, create a channel with three fields (I only care about ping, DL and UL, you may want more), go to the API page and make a note of your write API.

Do the stuff to get speedtest on your firewall, run a speedtest and note which server it decides is your local/fastest - I use the one hosted by my ISP, for example. Then run a speedtest –list | grep <your chosen="" server="" name="">to get the ID (eg. speedtest --list | grep Virgin in my case)

Run a speedtest --server <the id="" you="" found="">--csv to test

Edit the speedtest.py file and add these bits - note, this isn't clean or clever, I've gone with functional!

• Under the other import lines at the top:

import urllib2

myAPI="<your api="" key="" goes="" here,="" in="" the="" quotes="">"
baseURL = 'https://api.thingspeak.com/update?api_key=%s' % myAPI
print baseURL</your>

Then go down to around line 700 and look for the CSV output section, add the lines with -> below

def csv(self, delimiter=','):
        """Return data in CSV format"""

        data = self.dict()
        out = StringIO()
        writer = csv.writer(out, delimiter=delimiter, lineterminator='')
        row = [data['server']['id'], data['server']['sponsor'],
               data['server']['name'], data['timestamp'],
               data['server']['d'], data['ping'], data['download'],
               data['upload']]
        writer.writerow([to_utf8(v) for v in row])
->      f = urllib2.urlopen(baseURL + "&field1=%s&field2=%s&field3=%s" % (self.ping, self.download, self.upload))
->      print f.read()
->      f.close ()
        return out.getvalue()

Now run speedtest.py –server 1234 --csv and wait for it to finish, now check on ThingSpeak and check your three fields now have data.

I then put the command in my crontab:

*/30 * * * * /usr/local/bin/python2.7 speedtest.py --server 1234 --csv >/dev/null 2>&1

and now every 30 minutes my firewall does a speed test and updates ThingSpeak, which I can check the lovely graphs and make sure I'm relatively consistently getting decent metrics.</the></your>

[Sergestux]

@mdmogren:

Just wanted to post this update here for others who use this tool - it is now a package and can be installed using

pkg install py27-speedtest-cli

Then just run

./usr/local/bin/speedtest-cli

Gracias era lo que buscaba

[cukal]

@icewraithuk What a great hack & thanks for letting me discover ThingSpeak!

I changed the output from bits/sec to Mbit/sec:

f = urllib2.urlopen(baseURL + "&field1=%s&field2=%s&field3=%s" % (self.ping, int(self.download) / 1048576, int(self.upload) / 1048576))

[S762]

Sorry, I know this is an old topic but how to I uninstall this package? I used the following to install but don't see it listed under the package manager and would like to remove it.

pkg install py27-speedtest-cli

[RaidArray]

You should be able to do a "pkg remove <package name>" from the cli via ssh

[S762]

@raidarray said in Speedtest CLI. Run speedtest on pfSense box:

You should be able to do a "pkg remove <package name>" from the cli via ssh

Thank you!