Speedtest (a perl CLI)

The provided perl script is a command-line interface to the speedtest.net infrastructure so that flash is not required

It was written to feature the functionality that speedtest.net offers without the overhead of flash or java and the need of a browser.

Raison-d'être

The tool is there to give you a quick indication of the achievable throughput of your current network. That can drop dramatically if you are behind (several) firewalls or badly configured networks (or network parts like switches, hubs and routers).

It was inspired by the same project written in python: speedtest-cli, but I neither like python, nor did I like the default behjavior of that script. I also think it does not take the right decisions in choosing the server based on distance instead of speed. That does matter if one has fiber lines. I prefer speed over distance.

Requirements

The script requires perl 5.10.0 or newer. It requires the following modules to be available (from CPAN or from CORE):

Data::Dumper CORE module since perl-5.005
Getopt::Long CORE module since perl-5
HTML::TreeBuilder
LWP::UserAgent
Math::Trig CORE module since perl-5.004
Time::HiRes CORE module since perl-5.7.3
XML::Simple
Data::Peek optional but recommended. does fallback to Data::Dumper if not available

The script runs on every system that runs perl. I tested on Linux, HP-UX, AIX and Windows 7.

Debian wheezy will run with just two additional packages:

apt-get install libxml-simple-perl libdata-peek-perl

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md which states where and how you can contribute

TODO

Make an installer
Enable alternative XML parsers

Disclaimer

Due to language implementation, it may report speeds that are not consistent with the speeds reported by the web interface or other speed-test tools. Likewise for reported latencies, which are not to be compared to those reported by tools like ping.

Share and enjoy

H.Merijn Brand (Tux) h.m.brand@xs4all.nl