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.

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!

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

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.

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

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/.

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.

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

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

• 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)

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