Estimating download speed

From: Amir Hardon (hardon_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Tue 25 May 2004 - 15:56:49 IDT


Hi,
I tried to find out which Mandrake mirror will be the fastest for me before
doing a network install, so I downloaded the mirrors file(well actually only
the relevant part of it for me) and hacked up this line:

sed -n 's/^.*\(http:\/\/\|ftp:\/\/\)\([^\/]*\)\([^ ]*\).*$/\2/p' mirrors.html
| fping -e | sed -n 's/\([^(]*\)(\([0-9]*\).*/\2 \1/p' | sort -n

I started downloading the floppy image from the mirror that replied to my ping
the fastest, but the download speed was very low...

I tried to send bigger pings (of 1000 bytes) and still found no relation
between the ping reply time and the actuall download speed...

Why is this? is the only way to find the fastest host is to start downloading
and check the actual download speed? I saw some windows programs that looks
for the fastest mirror before downloading (I think one of them is Getright),
how does they do it?

Thanks,
        -Amir.

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Tue 25 May 2004 - 16:06:19 IDT