Bandwidth measurement
For a project which I may be working on in the near future, I need to think about how I can measure user’s bandwidth. Although there are many tools available for doing this already (such as speedtest.net and many others), these generally all require java or a recent version of flash to be installed. Plus they appear mainly geared towards testing a broadband connection, rather than a dial up (or other slow type of connection). I’d like to avoid creating a program that needs to be installed on a users machine as I need to keep it as simple as possible.
My current thinking, avoiding any installation and as little effort as possible on the users part, is to use a simple webpage with a small piece of AJAX to download a file of fixed (known) size and just use javascript to calculate how long it takes to retrieve. I realise that there are obvious drawbacks to this approach:
- hard to measure latency
- accuracy of javascript timer
- other processes running on the machine
- proxy or caching servers getting in the way
However, I don’t need something extremely accurate, just something that is easy to use and gives a reasonable approximation of a users bandwidth (which will be dependent on a huge number of factors anyway, such as time of day, no of other users etc), is it 2kbps, 20kbps or 200kbps?
To get a better idea of the usual speed of a users connection, I can attempt to download several files of different sizes (from different servers), and take averages.
Is there anything I’m missing that would make this a really bad way to approach this? Or would it produce results so inaccurate they’d be useless?
