How to test the download speed to a specific server in another country?

Question

The question is simple: I have a HTTP server hosted in country A where I'm living in, then is there any facility/tool/service that I can use to test the download speed in another country B?

The story is, we have one customer in Istanbul, Turkey who says it's extremely slow to download a file on our server (hosted in China) over HTTP link. However we were able to test it fine in Paris.

Answer 1

Download speed can depend on the peering agreement between your hosting ISP and the ISP your customer uses for downloading the file. First step should be asking your customer to use traceroute to identify bottlenecks in the connection.

Google provides a service to speed test your server. See here. Unfortunately Turkey is not one of their testing locations.

If your HTTP server is running Apache the best testing method would be using the Apache Module mod_log_config to write a custom logfile. The option %T (case sensitive. Capital T!) measures "The time taken to serve the request, in seconds."