FTP and SFTP speed testing

Question

I am looking for a program that can test the connection speed (upload and download) between my computer and an FTP or SFTP server. The program should have as many following features as possible (approximately in descending order of priority):

• can do a speed test of several FTP/SFTP servers sequentially
• log all speed tests
• can be set to run every X hours
• can raise an alert (email/popup/etc.) if the speed is below a certain threshold (e.g. download below 500 KB/s)
• works with Windows 7 SP1 x64 Ultimate
• free

To perform the speedtest I can leave a large file (like 1GB) on each server.

Right now I simply use some usual FTP client (namely FileZilla FTP client) to test the speed of the servers, which is not very convenient. I don't have access to some of the FTP/SFTP servers so the speed test program has to be client-side.

Answer 1

Install python then using urllib.urlretrieve you can do some thing like:

import urllib
import datetime

urls = ['ftp://someserver/path/to/file', ....]
times = []

for url in urls:
   started = datetime.datetime.now()
   urllib.urlretrieve(url, '/tmp/saved.bin') # You may wish to add a callback to time out slow connections
   ended = datetime.datetime.now()
   times.append(ended-started)
# Generate your log here

Answer 2

If you are willing to write few lines of script code, then you may consider Syncplify.me FTP Script. Its editor comes with a handy "wizard" that builds common test case scenarios for you, then you only have to customize such scripts for your own needs. Script execution can then be scheduled using the Windows scheduler. And it's free for personal use.