If you’re curious about your Internet connection’s performance then of course there are plenty of online speed tests around which promise to tell you more. But these are limited, in particular because they can only measure your connection speed at a single point in time, while your actual performance will probably vary throughout the day.

For more accurate results, then, you should probably grab a copy of JD’s Auto Speed Tester, a powerful free tool which runs in the background and automatically benchmarks your connection at regular intervals.

The program runs hourly tests of all the core statistics, including upload and download speed, ping time, packet loss and jitter. These details are displayed on a graph, so you can see how they vary over time, and are also logged to a CSV file if you’d like to run more detailed analyses later.

Clear graphs plot the progress of your internet speed over time

And if the upload or download speeds fall below some specified figure then you can even have the program send you an email as a warning.

JD’s Auto Speed Tester is highly configurable, so if any of this doesn’t suit your needs then the chances are that it can be tweaked. You can turn particular tests on or off, for instance; define your own servers for the upload, download or ping tests; and tell the program not to run its tests if you’re busy downloading, say, reducing the chance of it interfering with your regular PC use.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of JD’s Auto Speed Tester, though, is just how lightweight it is. The program consumed barely more than 1.2MB RAM when running in the background on our test PC, and even when browsing the interface it needed only a little more than 2MB.

If you’re looking for the definitive verdict on your internet connection, then, JD’s Auto Speed Tester is the perfect tool to help: detailed and highly configurable, it should run comfortably on most PCs and laptops.