Free Network Performance Test Tool: Wget

When it comes to network performance testing there is no shortage of tools and techniques. To make it a bit easier, I suggest you determine the goal and reason for your testing. For example if you want to test throughout and packet loss over a wireless network to illustrate radio signal, iPerf or iPerf3 are the way to go since those tools run in memory.

But if you want to measure the true performance of a web server, you would want to include the latency introduced by its storage system and load. In this case, you need to download a file from the server. Here is where a tool like GNU Wget comes in.

Wget is a free command-line tool used to retrieve files over HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS protocols. You can get the software here, and a manual is also available.

In this video, I show you how to get up and running with Wget and how the –limit-rate option works. I also explain how a simple batch file can be used to automate the testing.