Setting up an Internet Speedtest server on independent webserver

[tankman1989]

I'd like to figure out a way to set up a speed test server on one of my web servers (that has a gigabit connection). I, as well as many of my customers, are having a lot of problems with Windstream's DSL Internet service when it comes to connection speeds. I can do a speedtest on sites like Speakeasy or Speedtest.net and it usually shows about 65-85% of the speed which we are supposed to get but when I try to download from any other site I have been getting about 10-20% of the speed. If I download with my cable connection from the same site or server I get full speed of the service I'm being provided (both services are 12Mbps) so the problem isn't with the server or site.

I'm wondering if there is a way to test speeds from servers or sites other than the popular speed testing sites. I think Windstream has some rules programed into their routers to allow more bandwidth when connecting to the speed test sites. I can't think of any other way that I (and other customers) can be getting higher speeds only when connecting to the popular speed test sites.

I have written some batch files and scripts that run a few times an hour which run wget to download a 15meg file. This outputs the average speed of download which is what I'm looking at getting from the test. When I test the two connections on the same office network (same router and computer) at the same time I get full download speeds from the cable modem and about 10-20% on the DSL connection.

I'd like to be able to set up a web page similar to that of speakeasy that will test download speeds. I want to prove that the speed test sites are getting priority bandwidth from the provider making them useless for testing.

I'm not looking for anyone to make the site for me, just looking for any advice for how to start to set this up. It is extremely aggravating when I call Windstream's tech support and they tell me that everything is fine because of one test to a pre-routed site and they tell me that the problem is with my or my customer's equipment - when it works fine with a different connection.

Any suggestions would be great in how to handle this issue and set up some testing servers.

 

[ShinyTech]

I know the speedtest.net allows you to setup a server application to make your computer the server it connects to when it performs the test. I havent looked into it much myself, but one of my firends set it up for fun and he said it wasnt that difficult.

 

[tankman1989]

I know the speedtest.net allows you to setup a server application to make your computer the server it connects to when it performs the test. I havent looked into it much myself, but one of my firends set it up for fun and he said it wasnt that difficult.

Thanks! That is exactly what I'm looking at doing. I had no idea that the site offered something like this.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Well I know many if not all speedtest.net sites use multithreaded connections, meaning you connect to it multiple times during the speed test. You can not compare that to wget as you will almost never achieve the same speed with a single thread as you would multiple threads.

As for download speed from the same site (single threaded) varying from connection to connection. Theres many things that could be and it would be rare to really care about that. If you want to download a single large file from a website (which is pretty uncommon these days with torrents and what not) i suppose I would go with a download accelerator software of some sort.

Edit: If you want a file to test speed with for single thread downloads use: http://speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip