Question

Is there a way my app (OS X, 10.7 target) can determine the internet connection speed without downloading a file? All the other questions here seem to be downloading files. My app is a menu bar app, so downloading a file every so often seems really inefficient (even if small).

Any ideas? Can I just passively watch incoming bytes on the system? If so, what frameworks do I need to look into?

Answer 1

OSX is not my area of expertise, but this should apply to all similar situations.

You can “passively watch bytes” passing through the system, and this will give you a good graph of network throughput for general usage (ie, how much you use of your internet connection), but this will not give you an example of the actual network speed.

For instance, most network traffic is small and scattered, randomly going to and from different applications. By this general usage you can not determine what the network is capable of doing, because you will not come close to reaching that by browsing the internet or chatting on skype, etc.

In order to find out how fast your network is, you need to reach it’s limit (saturate it) – and in order to do that, you need to find a fixed amount of data that is moderate in size and see how long it takes to transfer. The larger the file (to a certain extent), the more accurate your calculations of network speed will be. (obviously because you’re taking an average, the more input data you have to work with, the more precise your calculations are going to be)

tl;dr? Calculating network speed is an expensive operation. You can’t just monitor network usage, as it wont give you anything useful.