How to detect internet speed in JavaScript?

Question

How can I create a JavaScript page that will detect the user’s internet speed and show it on the page? Something like “your internet speed is ??/?? Kb/s”.

Answer 1

The image trick is cool but in my tests it was loading before some ajax calls I wanted to be complete.

The proper solution in 2017 is to use a worker (http://caniuse.com/#feat=webworkers).

The worker will look like:

/**
 * This function performs a synchronous request
 * and returns an object contain informations about the download
 * time and size
 */
function measure(filename) {
  var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
  var measure = {};
  xhr.open("GET", filename + '?' + (new Date()).getTime(), false);
  measure.start = (new Date()).getTime();
  xhr.send(null);
  measure.end = (new Date()).getTime();
  measure.len = parseInt(xhr.getResponseHeader('Content-Length') || 0);
  measure.delta = measure.end - measure.start;
  return measure;
}

/**
 * Requires that we pass a base url to the worker
 * The worker will measure the download time needed to get
 * a ~0KB and a 100KB.
 * It will return a string that serializes this informations as
 * pipe separated values
 */
onmessage = function(e) {
  measure0 = measure(e.data.base_url + '/test/0.bz2');
  measure100 = measure(e.data.base_url + '/test/100K.bz2');
  postMessage(
    measure0.delta + '|' +
    measure0.len + '|' +
    measure100.delta + '|' +
    measure100.len
  );
};

The js file that will invoke the Worker:

var base_url = PORTAL_URL + '/++plone++experimental.bwtools';
if (typeof(Worker) === 'undefined') {
  return; // unsupported
}
w = new Worker(base_url + "/scripts/worker.js");
w.postMessage({
  base_url: base_url
});
w.onmessage = function(event) {
  if (event.data) {
    set_cookie(event.data);
  }
};

Code taken from a Plone package I wrote:

• https://github.com/collective/experimental.bwtools/blob/master/src/experimental/bwtools/browser/static/scripts/