Feature Request: Speed Test Plugin

House Of Cards · Nov 7, 2018, 1:44 AM

Good evening,

I'm not a developer, but I'd like to throw a suggestion out there and see if anyone else would find this useful. Perhaps someone with coding knowledge could throw something together for a plugin...

It seems to be a simple item to add. A plugin that simply does a speed test to a specified site, and records the history in a graph so you could see your last speed result, and a history of your speed results. This would enable users to see if there has been a degradation in their ISP over time, etc...

Just a specified URL, a schedule of how often to run, and a result graph. That would be useful on the dashboard.

What do you all think?

jimp · Nov 7, 2018, 6:22 PM

That's not a good idea. You do not want to run a speed test from the firewall itself. The CPU cycles consumed by the speed test itself will lower the potential throughput of the firewall. That may not be a factor on severely overpowered machines compared to their link speed, but it's big enough that it's not something we want to encourage.

Always test speed through a firewall, never to the firewall.

If you insist, there are packages like iperf and py27-speedtest-cli that you might be able to setup for testing.

House Of Cards · Nov 8, 2018, 1:20 AM

It certainly wouldn't be for everyone, especially the corporate world. I'm only using this at home to get advanced features and protection. Very low requirements, and it would be handy to know if my ISP is experiencing issues. I only wish to run a test each night during down time and see if there are any trends... I can't be the only one. ;-)

I'll have to look more into those packages.

KOM · Nov 8, 2018, 2:04 PM

I find that latency is much more important, and I monitor that using Smokeping on an RPi.

Grimson · Nov 8, 2018, 5:17 PM

@kom said in Feature Request: Speed Test Plugin:

I find that latency is much more important, and I monitor that using Smokeping on an RPi.

If you have gateway monitoring enabled pfSense is already doing that for you, just got to Status -> Monitoring and switch to the Quality graph in the settings.

KOM · Nov 8, 2018, 6:42 PM

I find smokeping easier to use, and I use it to track several targets besides my gateway. Also and more importantly, I run it at home where I don't have pfSense as my router.