Hacker's ramblings

Speedtest.net has pretty much gained The-place-to-test-your-connection-speed -status. It's like Google for doing web searches. There simply is no real competition available.

Mr. Matt Martz (while throwing hot coals) did study their JavaScript-code enough to write their client-API with Python.

The installation into proper directory (recommended: /usr/local/bin/) with proper permissions is this simple:

wget -O speedtest-cli \
 https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli

The built-in automatic detection of nearest server does not work for me very well. Their recommended nearest server is not in the country I live (Finland), but on Russian side. The network connections over their border aren't that good and it simply does not yield reliable measurements. Not to worry, the CLI-version can do following:

speedtest_cli --list | fgrep Finland
864) Nebula Oy (Helsinki, Finland) [204.35 km]

Now that we know the server ID of a proper point, we can do:

speedtest_cli --server 864

It will yield:

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Finland Oyj (80.80.80.80)...
Hosted by Nebula Oy (Helsinki) [204.35 km]: 14.782 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 92.69 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 4.32 Mbit/s

Nice!

Again, thanks Matt for sharing your work with all of us.