[GTALUG] Wget under-reports data transfer rate ("bandwidth") by 5% (MB != MiB)

[Peter Renzland]

> Wget can be used to measure download data rate.
> For example, 

wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip

> Then observe the progress meter and kill the process.


The information on this page maybe helpful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Deviation_between_powers_of_1024_and_powers_of_1000

The version of wget that I have is GNU Wget 1.16.3 built on darwin14.4.0.
It appears that the most recent version is GNU Wget 1.17.1

I wonder whether the current version still uses 1 MB == 2^20 B, or whether it now uses 1 MB == 10^6 B.

If someone is interested in this question, it would probably be easiest to simply try running the current Wget.
Or one could look at the source, if one is so inclined.

I thought someone here might be interested in the question.  If not, I'll take it to FSF, but I thought I'd start local.

-- Peter Renzland at gmail.com