A small software suite to periodically test and plot your internet speed (to make sure your ISP is honest).
You'll need Ookla's Speedtest CLI to use this software.
Most simply, the user can open a screen and launch the script to automatically test every 20 minutes and plot, like:
$ screen
$ python autospeedtest.py
The script can be stopped at any time by touching halt in the script directory, (or the directory from which the script was called. Touching halt will not interrupt a test if it is currently ongoing but it will interrupt any future test until WAIT_TO_REMOVE minutes have passed).
The script contains a number of options to allow the user to customize the frequency and site of test.
The PERIOD variable controls the approximate period between tests. Specifically, the script tries to run a test (or tests) in every PERIOD-minute interval throughout the day. Then, to avoid potential conflict with other scheduled network activities (even others outside the local network), the script adds [0,PERIOD) time before starting the test in each time interval.
The WAIT_TO_REMOVE variable specifies how long the script should wait (in minutes) before automatically removing the halt file. This functionality is included in case the user forgets to resume the test.
The SITES variable is a dictionary containing the Ookla server IDs and a description of each testing location. Users can add or remove entries to this dictionary to change the servers with which they test. For plots, if a server is found in the results database that cannot be found in the SITES dictionary, its server ID will be used in its place.
A list of server IDs (useful for the SITES variable) can be here or here, (the second link seems to be a list of US Speedtest servers. For other countries YMMV, but Google should be able to help you). The most useful thing for me has been to go to speedtest.net, run a few tests on servers that it automatically chooses, and choose the one I like most or that seems to provide the most consistent results.
Beyond in-script options, commandline args allow the user to run one-off tests and plots.
For testing:
$ python autospeedtest.py -t
For plotting:
$ python autospeedtest.py -p
The user can use these options to set up cron jobs for testing and plotting if leaving open a screen is undesireable.
There are 3 switches that create different plots. Because all plots are created automatically any time anything is plotted, the user shouldn't need to change any of these parameters or options. (If so, you'll need to modify the script iself.) All plots are remade when calling autospeedtest.py -p from the commandline or when the script plots by itself.
These plots show funamentally different statistics about the user's internet experience. The bandwidth plots show raw serial throughput on the connection (like what one might see if downloading a file or watching online video) while the latency plot shows ping and packetloss statistics.
Here is a time-of-day bandwidth plot, appearing as bandwidth in the filename:
Notice that download speeds are signficantly impacted by time of day.
Here is a time-of-day latency plot, appearing as latency in the filename:
Notice that latency and packetloss are also impacted by time of day (but perhaps to a lesser extent). A note on packetloss: Ookla's packetloss statistics do not seem reliable in comparison to other tests avaiable, (see packetlosstest.com). The author's experience is that Ookla's measures significantly under estimate realworld packetloss. This could be because of a number of reasons (Ookla's Speedtest uses TCP, among other reasons), but the result is nonetheless that this should not be taken to be a reliable measure.
This option allows the user to choose between plotting all data or just the most recent 3 days.
The all option is shown below. all is considered the default option so nothing is prepended or appended to the filename.
Notice that this is the same plot from the discussion above of the bandwidth vs latency options. This doesn't mean anything, just that I thought it showed the differences well.
The recent option is shown below. recent is considered the adjusting option, so it is appended as -recent to the end of the filename.
Notice that this plot has significantly fewer datapoints than the plot immediately above it. This is because we're only using the most recent 3 days of data.
This option allows the user to plot data when it was recorded or overlayed onto time-of-day.
The epoch option is shown below. epoch is considered the default option so nothing is prepended or appended to the filename.
This is the first time you're seeing the epoch option in any of the plots in this readme! This is simply because I think it's less representative of overall behavior and therefore less interesting than the tod adjusted plots. The gap in the middle is when I stopped tests for a day and a half for a really large download (a few hundred gigabytes).
Also notice that packetloss results do not appear consistently. This is because for some reason, Ookla's speedtest-cli doesn't always yield the key in the returned json object, (which itself is likely because there isn't always a packetloss result for some reason). So be it...as you can see the script will plot either way, (even if there are no packetloss results in some period).
The tod option is shown below. tod is considering the adjusting option, so it is appended as tod- to the beginning of the filename.
Notice again that this was the second plot shown under the bandwidth vs latency option. It's just nice to see again.
The sqlite3 database is organized as:
TABLE tests (
date TEXT NOT NULL,
site INTEGER,
raw TEXT,
latency REAL,
jitter REAL,
dl_bandwidth INTEGER,
ul_bandwidth INTEGER,
packetloss REAL
)
You can explore the sample database in the samples directory in the root of this project, but note that I've cleaned the raw column from the database because it includes my public IP.
If any other test information is desired, the contents of the raw column can be used to access the json object (string) returned by speedtest-cli.
This tool also includes two other scripts: autospeedtest_ingestjson.py and autospeedtest_createdb.py.
The autospeedtest_createdb.py script is used to create a database for results. It is called automatically if a database cannot be found, or if explicitly called it will backup any existing databases before creating a new one.
The autospeedtest_ingestjson.py is a tool used to migrate old results in json format to the new database format.
Happy testing, and may your ISP's whims be ever in your favor. 😉