How to check Internet Speed via Terminal?

I recommend the speedtest-cli tool for this. I created a blog post (Measure Internet Connection Speed from the Linux Command Line) that goes into detail of downloading, installing and usage of it.

The short version is this: (no root required)

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py | python -

Output:

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Comcast Cable (x.x.x.x)...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by FiberCloud, Inc (Seattle, WA) [12.03 km]: 44.028 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 32.29 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 5.18 Mbit/s

Update in 2018:

Using pip install --user speedtest-cli gets you a version that is probably newer than the one available from your distribution's repositories.

Update in 2016:

speedtest-cli is in Ubuntu repositories now. For Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) and later use:

sudo apt install speedtest-cli
speedtest-cli

try this on command line

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

try this too

sourceforge.net/projects/tespeed/

got it from above link

If you can't be bothered to install iperf , you could precede any command that shifts a known amount of data with the time command and do a sum.

iperf is simple and easy to use.

It requires a client and server.

(on the server)

 user@server$ iperf -s

(on the client)

 user@client$ iperf -c server.domain
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 Client connecting to 192.168.1.1, TCP port 5001
 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 [  3] local 192.168.1.3 port 52143 connected with 192.168.1.1 port 5001
 [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
 [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec    113 MBytes  94.7 Mbits/sec

More Details

Well I use wget for it. That little tool tells me nicely what speed I have.

To use it just point to a file in internet that is relatively bigger so that you can get a better estimate of it.

For example

typing: wget http://hostve.com/neobuntu/pics/Ubu1.avi would start to download the Ubu1.avi file and show at what speed it is downloading.

Of course there are several recommendations:

1. Speed test yourself with good servers. In the case of my link the speed is less than 200KB so if you have a higher speed, the server will be the bottleneck for you, not your actual speed.

2. The highest speed you will see is the maximum speed that your connection and the server's connection can offer. If your connection is 512KB and the place where you are downloading is 400KB, your max connection will be 400KB because it is the max for the server you are downloading from.

3. You need to do the test at least 5 times to have a reliable speed check or at least do it for a minute or two. This will help you have a more accurate check.

4. You need to have at least 4 or 5 different testing sources to have a more accurate speed. Never test only from the same site as this can be affected by your distance to it, any problem in the server and the connections to it, etc. Always test from different servers.

ARIA2

This is an alternative to wget. The downside of wget is the lack of parallel connections. To use aria2 we fist need to download it:

   sudo apt-get install aria2

To use it is simple:

In the image, the -x 4 is how many parallel connections we wish to use. The CN parameter in the next line shows how many active parallel connections were permitted to download from that site. In this case CN is 4. But if we tried to have more connections we would get something like this:

We set 8 parallel connections but the site only allowed a maximum of 5 as shown by CN:5. This could be solved by the -j option which tells aria2c the maximum concurrent connections we want (Which by default is 5) but if the server has limited this, -j will not work.

Since speedtest-cli is a python application, it is much easier to install by doing:

pip install speedtest-cli

or:

easy_install speedtest-cli

Depending on how Python is installed on your system, you may need to be root to do the above.

I'm regularly using something like this:

% wget -O /dev/null --progress=dot:mega http://cachefly.cachefly.net/10mb.test ; date
--2020-01-06 03:31:05--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/10mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net (cachefly.cachefly.net)... 2607:7700::18:0:1:cdea:afaf, 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net (cachefly.cachefly.net)|2607:7700::18:0:1:cdea:afaf|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 10485760 (10M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: <</dev/null>>

     0K ........ ........ ........ ........ ........ ........ 30% 3.02M 2s
  3072K ........ ........ ........ ........ ........ ........ 60% 3.97M 1s
  6144K ........ ........ ........ ........ ........ ........ 90% 3.94M 0s
  9216K ........ ........                                    100% 3.99M=2.8s

2020-01-06 03:31:08 (3.62 MB/s) - <</dev/null>> saved [10485760/10485760]

Mon Jan  6 03:31:08 CST 2020
%

You can change the 10mb part in /10mb.test to 1mb, 4mb, 5mb, 10mb, 50mb, 100mb, 200mb, 400mb, 2000mb, 4000mb, and possibly some other values.

You can also change the --progress=dot:mega part to --progress=dot:default, --progress=dot:binary, --progress=dot:mega and --progress=dot:giga; this setting helps you see how fast the download is going, and preserve more than a single reading over the whole duration of the download, which is helpful for when you need to share the results with someone, or just save it for your own records as a sort of a graph.

I happen to like the speedometer Ubuntu cli.

speedometer -r eth0

To watch a live graph of incoming data speeds.

a simple one-liner that tests how long it takes to download 100MB (works on /bin/sh also):

t=$(date +"%s"); wget http://speedtest.tele2.net/100MB.zip -O ->/dev/null ; echo -n "MBit/s: "; expr 8 \* 100 / $(($(date +"%s")-$t))

explanation:

1. store the timestamp in $t
2. download 100mb but don't store anything
3. calculate 8 * 100mb / $t

Run several instances of wget with timeout command on large files:

#!/bin/bash

timeout 5 wget -q url_1/100MB.zip &
timeout 5 wget -q url_2/file.zip &
timeout 5 wget -q url_3/sample.mov &
timeout 5 wget -q url_4/speech.mp4 &

And then write a script to calculate the total bytes downloaded and divide 5 seconds you will get a bytes/sec figure. Should be quite accurate and you can add more instances to max your bandwidth.

I have yet to test the full script but the single line command "timeout 5 wget url" works, and you get a partially downloaded file as a result (if 5 secs is not enough to complete the download).

you can use tespeed . it is a Terminal network speed test that uses servers from Speedtest.net. It uses nearest test server but can also use one manually specified by the user.

 git clone git://github.com/Janhouse/tespeed.git
 cd tespeed
 git submodule init
 git submodule update
 ./tespeed.py 

for more info use :

 ./tespeed.py  -h

it will provide more option for speed test.