Website / Free software to test internet connection speed?

[Curtis N]

I'm having issues with my local ISP. I doubt I'm getting the speed I'm paying for and having trouble uploading files to my print vendor.

Before I call them up and raise heck, I want to know what speed I'm getting. I seem to recall websites that will test your connection speed but I can't remember them now.

Who can help me out?

[Bruce_B]

http://www.speedtest.net/

[Curtis N]

Thank you Bruce!
I'm getting 2316 kb/s down,
426 kb/s up.
That exceeds my ISP's promises, so I guess there must be some other reason Youtube videos won't play smooth.

[Chas.]

It could be because you're memory bound and it's having to do excessive paging. How much memory do you have.

[Curtis N]

Maybe not enough. I'm using an ancient laptop. It sometimes won't play videos properly even off the hard drive, but it does play some videos with much better resolution than youtube without problem.

[txduggan]

Ping Plotter works great to find where the bottlenecks and slowdowns are:

http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html

The freeware version has a little nag when you launch it, but I don't mind it.

Tom D