For all those enterprising young XBOX Developers out there---
How about a bandwidth tester?
I just switched my xbox from a wired to wireless network (via D-LINK's DWL-G20 gaming adapter), and I need a convenient way to repeatedly test the strength of the signal so I can place the wireless box where it gets the most bandwidth. I use XBMC for all kinds of media streaming from a central fileserver, so maximizing my throughput is important.
What I need is a simple bandwidth tester--something that would repeatedly download a file of a given size and time the download, giving a rough estimate of the network speed. I also need to be able to specify the address where it gets the file -- to do an accurate test, the download needs to be from a local computer, not the Internet (even in a suboptimal position, my XBox probably gets faster local throughput than my Internet connection ... a download from the 'net would tell me nothing).
The easiest way to do this would be with a set of test files of a given size, downloaded over HTTP (I have a local webserver, so that's what I'd do), but some other options might work, too.
What if the app was built as a Python script within XBMC? My XBMC config is already pointed to a number of network shares -- a user could pick a network location and let the script hunt around through the files until it finds one of about the right size to test with, and then do the performance monitoring using that.
Running the test repeatedly with a user-definable interval (once every 30 seconds, once a minute), and logging (write to a local text file?) would be great, too. Some basic reporting features (average bandwidth over time, etc.) would be even better.
Anybody want to take it on? Sounds like a fun app to build -- I don't speak Python or have XDK, so it's not my project, but somebody ought to do it.
AK
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Topic: Network Bandwidth Tester? (Read 31 times)