Speed test for large files

Hello my friends,

First of all, I am fascinated with NetWorx comprehensive network data coverage, flexible customization and easy to use.

About the speed testing, however, an essential option is missing, just like in every bandwidth testing software. Now I feel motivated to suggest that option to be included in future releases of NetWorx.

You see, when we users want to know if our broadband ISP's are actually delivering the bandwidth they are advertising, we need to be sure they are really fulfilling our expectations.

Now, for what I know, the correct process of measuring an average transfer rate is by collecting the sum of data weight transfers in certain time. But not every transfer through our internet connection is eligible to get that measure. They must be only of files that weight a minimum of bits, OR the transfer events that lasts a minimum of seconds. Why? Because in a normal internet usage environment, users navigate the web, check out photos and posts in their social media, watch videos, check their email inboxes, download files and upload files, etc. But many if not the majority of those individual transfers are formed of files (say, html documents, jpg OR gif images) that weight only a few Kilobytes. So those tiny transfers are not using the full potential of our broadband connection. Nevertheless, they are still counting for the Networx monitoring and capture rates data.

Are you getting my point? The very option that could change that scenario for a more accurate measuring should be to select those minimums of files size AND/OR transfers time in seconds per transfer event, in order to base the logging ONLY with those files or transfer events. If the measuring software doesn't focus only on those transfers, the average rate obviously will be far less than the actual potential of our connection. So this is an unfair method for our ISP's as long as a not objective form to letting us know what is the actual maximums transfer capabilities.

I hope I have been clear (English is not my first language as you could figure out) in this formulation, to both users and developers of Networx. It would be great to have that option working soon!

Thanks!

ragbrok

I am afraid from a technical point of view, this is a very challenging task, if not impossible. Suppose we somehow figure out how to extract file size and we know we're downloading a large file. This download may be slow because that's the rate the server is sending it. Is this a measure how fast our connection is? Not really.

The way speed-measuring software and on-line services works is sending and receiving a file of the known size to and from the nearest server. This however requires significant investments in the infrastructure to ensure every user has a server for bandwidth testing not too far away.

All in all there is SpeedTest that can tell you any time how fast your connection is. The built-in NetWorx's SpeedMeter merely measures how much data passed in X seconds and I am afraid we cannot improve it any further.

I have not considered that variable Andrew, you are completely right. The transferring rate capabilities of the remote server from where we are downloading is that variable.

Speedtest is a good option for knowing how our connection is working at a particular moment throughout the day. In my case, my main ISP is not as stable as I would like. I know that because in my testing I have downloaded one file from the same server at the exact same time, using two computers, one with main ISP and the second using a different one. The results where very different...

The thing that I like about the permanent monitoring and automatic measuring desktop software, is that it allows us to know a more accurate average with longer period of transferring events, taking into account the variations our connection had. I think the way to solve this is to intentionally keep transfer tests from FTP servers with known stable speeds, during the period of time we consider appropriate.

Then again, even with the known FTP servers while the testing is done, there should be no their no other connections. Downloading something else in parallel would render the test useless. I am afraid there's no silver bullet for your idea in the end.