Testing for Speed

[Grant Edwards]

In article <mailman.982599381.15269.python-list at python.org>, Ben Ocean wrote:

>How do I determine a visitor's connection speed? Clock a round trip?

"Connection speed" is a rather vague term.  The only meaningful
results are going to be from measuring whatever it is you care
about. If you want to know how long it takes to download a 100K
file, then transfer a 100K file and measure it.  For file
transfers, you should have a pretty representative number by
measuring how much data you can transfer over a period of a
several seconds.

If you just want round-trip packet timing, doing a "ping" will
tell you that, but ping times don't correlate with data
transfer rates.  Ping measures how long the pipe is, data transfer
rate is determined by its diameter.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I'm reporting for
                                  at               duty as a modern person. I
                               visi.com            want to do the Latin
                                                   Hustle now!