On Mar 23, 2016, at 10:23, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 08:07:12PM -0400, Peter Renzland wrote:
Wget can be used to measure download data rate. For example, wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip
Then observe the progress meter and kill the process.
IMHO, wget thinks a MB is 2^20 (== 1MiB), instead of 10^6. This results in a 5% error. (Softlayer seems to have made the same error.)
It used to juse say K/s or M/s and they didn't want to change it to KB and MB to avoid wasting characters on the line for the progress bar. I guess someone eventually did change it, but did not want to change it to KiB and MiB.
If you use --report-speed=bits you get Mb/s and Kb/s and I think those are actually "correct".
Pretty sure wget predates the existance of KiB and MiB anyhow and changing the meaning later could "break" things. Probably wouldn't though.
I've confirmed that --report-speed=bits gives the correct rate. Also, Curl, with -w '%{speed_download}' gives the correct rate. -- Peter Renzland@gmail.com