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sparkyfish

An open-source internet speed and latency tester. You can test your bandwidth against a public Sparkyfish server or host your own server with the included server-side daemon.

About

Sparkyfish offers several advantages over speedtest.net and its unofficial clients like speedtest-cli

  • You can run your own private sparkyfish server, free-of-charge. (compare to $1,995+ that Ookla charges for a private speedtest.net server)
  • You can test speeds > 1 Gbps if your server and client hosts support them. Most speedtest.net test servers don't have this capacity.
  • Sparkyfish comes with a colorful console-based client that runs on *nix and Windows
  • No net-neutrality issues
  • Sparkyfish uses an open protocol for testing. You're welcome to implement your own alternative front-end client or server!

Getting Started

Installation

The easiest way to get started is to download a binary release. Sparkyfish is written in Go and compiles to a static binary so there are no dependencies if you're using the official binaries.

Once you've downloaded the binary...

gunzip <binary>.gz
chmod 755 <binary>
mv <binary> /usr/local/bin/sparkyfish-cli

Running the client

Run the client like this:

sparkyfish-cli <sparkyfish server IP>[:port]

The client takes only one parameter. The IP (with optional :port) of the sparkyfish server. You can use our public server round-robin to try it out: us.sparkyfish.chrissnell.com. Sparkyfish servers default to port 7121.

Don't expect massive bandwidth from any of our current public servers. They're mostly just some small public cloud servers that I scrounged up from friends. For more info on the public sparkyfish servers, see docs/PUBLIC-SERVERS.md.

Running from Docker (optional)

You can also run sparkyfish-cli via Docker. I'm not sure if this is the most optimal way to use it, however. After running the client once, the terminal window environment gets a little hosed up and sparkyfish-cli will complain about window size the next time you run it. You can fix these by running reset in your terminal and then-re-running the image.

If you want to test it out, here's how to do it:

docker pull chrissnell/sparkyfish-cli:latest
docker run --dns 8.8.8.8 -t -i chrissnell/sparkyfish-cli:latest us.sparkyfish.chrissnell.com
reset  # Fix the broken terminal size env before you run it again

Building from source (optional)

If you prefer to build from source, you'll need a working Go environment (v1.5+ recommended) with GOROOT and GOPATH env variables properly configured. To build from source, run this command:

go get github.com/chrissnell/sparkyfish/sparkyfish-cli

Your binaries will be placed in $GOPATH/bin/.

Running your own Sparkyfish server

Running from command line

You can download the latest sparkyfish-server release from the Releases page. Then:

gunzip <binary filename>.gz
chmod 755 <binary filename>
./<binary filename> -h  # to see options
./<binary filename> -location="Your Physical Location, Somewhere"

By default, the server listens on port 7121, so make sure that you open a firewall hole for it if needed. If the port is firewalled, the client will hang during the ping testing.

Building from source (optional)

If you prefer to build from source, you'll need a working Go environment (v1.5+ recommended) with GOROOT and GOPATH env variables properly configured. To build from source, run this command:

go get github.com/chrissnell/sparkyfish/sparkyfish-server

Docker method

Running a Sparkyfish server in Docker is easy to do but not suited for production purposes because the throughput can be limited by flaky networking if you're not running a recent Linux kernel and Docker version. I recommend you test with Docker and then deploy the native binary outside of Docker if you're going to run a permanent or public server.

To run under Docker:

docker pull chrissnell/sparkyfish-server:latest
docker run -e LOCATION="My Town, Somewhere, USA" -d -p 7121:7121 chrissnell/sparkyfish-server:latest

Future Efforts

  • Proper testing code and automated builds
  • A Sparkyfish directory server to allow for auto-registration of public Sparkyfish servers, including Route53 DNS setup
  • Adding a HTTP listener to sparkyfish-server to allow for Route53 health checks
  • Use termui's grid layout mode to allow for auto-resizing
  • Move to a WebSockets-based protocol for easier client-side support
  • HTML/JS web-based client! (Want to write one?)
  • iOS and Android native clients (help needed)

IRC

You can find the author and some operators of public servers in #sparkyfish on Freenode. Come join us!