Monitor Net Traffic... mtr

[Young]

John Hubbard wrote:
> Here is my problem;  I want to know what kind of bandwidth my isp is 
> really giving me.  I have looked at a few different speed tests and I 
> get different results from them, and they often seem far faster than 
> what I actually get.  Now I realize that the bottle neck might be coming 
> from whoever is serving the content, but I am not sure. 
> So the question is; is there any way to generate any kind of report of 
> my bandwidth?  I only care about how fast I am able to get data when I 
> am trying to download it.  Often the connection is not being used at all 
> and I don't want to factor that in. 
> Any thoughts? 
> 

Bandwidth may not be the problem. Dropped packets can hit hard.

There's a small program 'mtr' which will show you a lot of what's going 
on. It's a full screen ncurses and x11 traceroute tool.

http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/

It's in Synaptic
or
sudo aptitude install mtr

http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/
for the Windows version, which doesn't require installation.

I'm stuck at a Windows box for the moment, so I'll send along my results 
later.

Mark