Testing connection speed to SL

I'm trying to help one of my friends find out why their SL experience is laggier than it was a month or two ago. I personally haven't noticed any major change, we both live on the same land in the same simulator, and it doesn't appear to have changed in its performance. With the new Windlight based viewers, even my friend's older machine should be getting better frame-rates with the low detail settings, or Windlight features turned off. So it doesn't seem to be graphical.

What I'm trying to investigate now is the possibility of ISPs throttling access to Second Life, or otherwise changing in such a way that SL connection ends up degrading. What I'm hoping to try and find is a good way to test connection speed, similar to the many speed tests available online. Even if the figures are fairly rough, it should give us an idea of whether the connection is at fault or not.

Any ideas? Unfortunately my friend never used the main stats window (Ctrl-Shift-1) before so doesn't have figures for before and after, which would have helped.

How about an object with ten different prims, each showing a 1024x1024 texture with lots of detail. Clear cache, login, and rez the object. Time it with a stop-watch. Compare his numbers and yours.

The oher stndard advice might be defrag his disk.

Ive been suffering from this also in the last 2 months.. I had a steady connection to SL for the previous year and a half and recently boom cant do anything without Lag / packet loss related problems its particularly noticable with the stream to SL being a music lover this is a tad irritating. The same URL to a stream will work np in winamp if i then open SL ontop of winamp it constantly buffers close SL its good again. Same effect with in world media player also try do anything at all and the stream will cut out. Streams in SL are really nothing to do with SL itself but it shows that SL is somehow choking / sucking bandwidth of late.
There has been no noticable degrading on my connection to other Online games that i have also been using for a long time. Interesting theory about ISP throttling would love to know whats behind this. I am not alone either others have reported the same kind of problems and within the same timeframe (last 2 months).

In the past 3-4 RC/WL updated clients, there has been an increase in UpdateCull. I believe this is to do with prims, especially Sculpties. Sculpties are like movies, they refresh the image at a rate of around 12fps. It has jumped from a low 10-15% to a massive 40-50% of the client rendering engine, on my client (each client is dependant on the host system). I have a couple of kick a$$ systems, but both are suffering.

The latest WL/RC client, seems to have eased off and UpdateCull is now reading around 30-40%.

I run XP Sp2, Vista 32 and 64 bit OS's SP1, single, Dual and Quad core systems, 2-4gb ram and high end GC's 512mb-1gb DDRIII ram, with very little difference between performance, which at best sucks as I paid a big wad for my latest beast.

When you equate the loads on your bandwidth, Voice takes between 1.5-2mb of your bandwidth, SL between 50kbps-1mb, media between 32kbps-1.2mbps. Most are constant (media and voice).