Test WAN speed direct from pfsense shell or GUI

jamesc

Hi all,

As the subject says really, does anyone know of a way i can test WAN speed (upload/download) directly from the pfsense box, rather than going through sites such as speedtest.net which i have found to be inaccurate on some occasions.

Thanks

James

stephenw10

I have done this before by downloading a file from a known fast source to /dev/null using fetch.


[2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(1): fetch -o /dev/null http://download.thinkbroadband.com/50MB.zip
/dev/null                                     100% of   50 MB 1935 kBps 00m00s

Thinkbroadband seem to be able to saturate my connection and have range of file sizes:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/download.html
They are close to me though.

Steve

cmb

I commonly use Cachefly's test files for that, the same way Steve described.
http://cachefly.cachefly.net/10mb.test
http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test

jamesc

Thank you both, that works well for me too.

Next question: how do you guys test upload? Im guessing you send a file to a public FTP somewhere?

stephenw10

Yeh upload is a more difficult test. Personally my upload bandwidth is small enough that Speedtest.net gets good consistent results. Though it doesn't seem to test loadbalanced uploading.
It depends what you have access to out on the net somewhere. In the past I have done a similar test but downloading to a remote machine a file I have hosted here behind pfSense.
I guess uploading via ftp would be similar.

Steve

cmb

There aren't any public FTP servers that will accept uploads (or they'd quickly become warez depots). We have servers on very high speed connectivity in several locations that I use for that purpose when needed. That's not an easy task for most people though since there aren't such readily available resources.

nexusN

You may try this site with selecting the nearest location:
http://www.myspeedmeter.net/map.html#

stephenw10

The problem with those test sites is that they all run some java client or some other very high level code that consumes massive system resources in order to display a shiny graph and a 'speedometer'. >:(

The machine I'm writing this on is quite capable of saturating my WAN connections but it can't keep up with the java front end hence it always shows something completely unrealistic.

Steve