Time taken to download and upload a file

Alpharius

I'm looking for a method to measure how long it takes to download a file, and similarly for uploading. Essentially I need an accurate automatic measurement of time taken on a download/upload.

Any suggestions?

wunderbar

aside from doing a sample of the average download rate you get, then dividing the file size by that, you really can't. The problem with internet speeds is that even if you get an advertised 10Mbit download, it's never actually 10Mbit, and it varies, even during the same download, based on about 900 different factors, and there are the same variables on the host you're downloading from. Your host may only be able to provide you 5Mbit speeds, where another one will give you 4Mbit, and you may be sharing with other people downloading from that host, etc.

Basically, other than taking averages over time, measuring accurate download times is pretty difficult.

Tasteticle

wunderbar wrote: »

aside from doing a sample of the average download rate you get, then dividing the file size by that, you really can't. The problem with internet speeds is that even if you get an advertised 10Mbit download, it's never actually 10Mbit, and it varies, even during the same download, based on about 900 different factors, and there are the same variables on the host you're downloading from. Your host may only be able to provide you 5Mbit speeds, where another one will give you 4Mbit, and you may be sharing with other people downloading from that host, etc.

Basically, other than taking averages over time, measuring accurate download times is pretty difficult.

pretty much this.

But if you want to get some averages at any point in time I recommend

www.speedtest.net

wunderbar

Tasteticle wrote: »

wunderbar wrote: »

aside from doing a sample of the average download rate you get, then dividing the file size by that, you really can't. The problem with internet speeds is that even if you get an advertised 10Mbit download, it's never actually 10Mbit, and it varies, even during the same download, based on about 900 different factors, and there are the same variables on the host you're downloading from. Your host may only be able to provide you 5Mbit speeds, where another one will give you 4Mbit, and you may be sharing with other people downloading from that host, etc.

Basically, other than taking averages over time, measuring accurate download times is pretty difficult.

pretty much this.

But if you want to get some averages at any point in time I recommend

www.speedtest.net

even speedtest is not good for averages though. See, with my ISP, they have what's called "turbo boost" which essentially doubles my download speeds for the first 20 seconds of the download, so instead of 7.5Mbit I get 15Mbit-20Mbit. Speedtest, since it only tests a small file, shows my average download speed as something like 18Mbit down, when in reality, my speed is 7.5

Monolithic_Dome

Are you comfortable with the command line? Wget can keep a log as it downloads stuff, and it timestamps all the entries, so it'll look like

[10:20:00 AM] File xxxyyyy.zzz started
[10:22:03 AM] File xxyyyyy.zzz finished

So for keeping track of the actual time it takes to download a file, it'll get the job done.

Alpharius

oooh nice

admanb

On top of that, you can run the shell command time to get it down to the millescond.

time ls -al

---

real 0m0.021s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.003s

time wget <files>

---

<etc>