Calculating Internet Connection Speed

[cmgmyr]

I would like to calculate a viewer's internet connection speed when coming to a site. How do I do this? I've done a bunch of searches and came up with a few scripts that weren't that accurate when I tried them. Any ideas?

 

Thanks

[per1os]

Java and Flash are the two ways that most people use and usually takes a bit to do. I do not think this is really possible with out.

 

You can see working examples at www.dslreports.com/speedtest other than that without decent size files with multiple tests you cannot truly find out their speed.

[cmgmyr]

Well this is something that I found: http://support.internettoolkit.com/speedcheck/index.php but obviously I can't see the actual script. This is pretty much what I need, but I just need it to run in the background for the first time someone visits a site. I don't want to display the output, I just want to use that number internally.

[cmgmyr]

bump, any other ideas?

[ShogunWarrior]

Well the problem of course is that getting the browser to download a 1MB file without the user knowing and keeping them on the same page without them moving is pretty tricky. This isn't really a technical problem as much as simply a problem of convenience. If they know they are checking their connection speed you can simply push out a 1MB file in known size chunks and record the time taken but doing it in the background will be problematic especially on slower connections or where visitors keep moving. (On the technical side this could be done by putting an <img> tag into a page who's src was actually a PHP page which pushed out 1MB (or some large enough size) of data and logged the result)