Seeking help testing Linode speeds

Hi all,

I'm living in China, and recently my various VPNs and other methods I use to bypass the Glorious Golden Shield Project (aka: the great firewall) have either become frustratingly slow or ceased working entirely.

I am now looking to deploy my own shadowsocks proxy in a neighbouring country, as I've heard from local and foreign sources that the government has yet to effectively censor shadowsocks.

I am having trouble testing connection speed to Linode's servers - I tried downloading the test 100MB files from the resources –> speed test area of Linode's website, but my download speeds were suspiciously fast, and a Wireshark capture + geoip lookup confirmed that I was simply downloading a cached copy from my ISP (I have no idea why they would cache such files).

Can anyone suggest a better way to test connection quality to Linode's servers in Tokyo and/or Singapore?

Thanks in advance!