Testing bandwidth on a single port

Question

At work we are having issues with our till system. The company we use hosts the database centrally on a MySql server and we connect in on the standard port 3306.

The problem that we are having is that during the day, obviously the time we are using it most, the system can be horrifically slow. Some times it is OK, but often it times out on simple requests and is dropping the connection to the server at regular intervals.

I've run a number of speed tests on our broadband and although we do lose about 65% of our bandwith during peak times, our ping is still excellent and we are able to surf the interent without issues.

I've been in contact with the software vendor and they are suggesting that our ISP could be limiting the bandwidth on port 3306 or this port could simply be overloaded by others on our exchange.

So what I am looking for is a way to test the bandwidth on port 3306 and see how it performs. Does anyone know anyway to do this?

Thanks for any help you can be.

Answer 1

The easiest way to do that would be setting up a webserver (like lighttpd) on port 3306, share some big file (dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/www/bigfile bs=1M count=1000) and then just try to download it with a tool like wget.

This is easiest because it does not require special software to be installed not on the server nor client machine. (If it's your ISP blocking the port you don't need to test connectivity with exactly same server: just pick any with enough bandwidth).