737

Instead of going to sites like speedtest.net, I want to check my current Internet speed from the terminal on Ubuntu. How can I do it?

4
  • 5
    The results I'm getting with speedtest-cli are vastly under what I get from speedtest.net speedtest-cli Download 18.27 Mbits/s Upload 3.43 Mbits/s speedtest.net Download 59.38 Mbits/s Upload 12.14 Mbits/s I can't consider speedtest-cli to be in any way a valid test of network speed.
    – user375058
    Feb 3, 2015 at 12:46
  • 3
    @user375058: The speedtest-cli uses the same servers (etc.) as SpeedTest.net. You should consider the speedtest-cli and www.speedtest.net to be equivalent, just with a different front-end. I would be surprised if you get significantly different results consistently if they both use the same server. If they aren't using the same server, then you have no basis for comparison. Lastly, my results for both utilities vary by a factor of 2-4 from run to run. I suggest you test 2-4 servers, and perform 3–4 runs for each server and compare tools.
    – jvriesem
    Oct 26, 2015 at 22:33
  • @user375058: I actually just did what I suggested. See the link in my comment below for my results.
    – jvriesem
    Oct 27, 2015 at 0:06
  • 2
    sudo apt install speedtest-cli
    – ColdCold
    Sep 30, 2016 at 2:13

16 Answers 16

1177

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 2016:

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

sudo apt install speedtest-cli
speedtest-cli

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.

speedtest-cli

Update in 2022:

sudo apt install speedtest-cli
speedtest-cli --secure
29
  • 4
    This doesnt seem to work properly. I have BT infinity 50bBit down and 20Mbit up. But the results show up as 0.53Mbit down and 0.2Mbit up. Huh? Incorrect decimal placing? using wget I get 4.27M/s (34Mbit) (some other server though)?
    – Piotr Kula
    Sep 2, 2013 at 21:53
  • 39
    As it has already been stated here: 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.
    – CrandellWS
    Feb 9, 2014 at 4:18
  • 2
    Confirming that speedtest-cli is broken. Doesn't show speeds above 1Mbps. Doesn't transfer any info when claiming to do so.
    – int_ua
    Sep 10, 2014 at 0:32
  • 6
    This should really be the accepted answer...speedtest-cli is working fine for me; think @int_ua was either having compatibility problems or internet problems.
    – peelman
    Oct 30, 2014 at 12:22
  • 2
    This should be the right answer. Speed test means download AND upload. First answer ONLY measures the download speed, which is NOT a full picture of your internet connection speed. Especially if you are hosting something on that machine! Jan 20, 2015 at 14:14
146

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

16
  • 4
    Could you plz explain what /dev/null stands for? Apr 4, 2013 at 11:14
  • 18
    It is speacial file which simply the delete data written to it,
    – Tachyons
    Apr 4, 2013 at 12:24
  • 2
    For me on Ubuntu 14.10 with python 2.7.8 the command wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip works much better than using speedtset-cli the later seems to freeze and ^C fails to interrupte the command. With wget I have no problems cutting the download shrot with ^C
    – Willoczy
    Nov 27, 2014 at 20:50
  • 1
    @mlissner, looks like first speed in megabits, second in megabytes..
    – vp_arth
    Aug 14, 2015 at 11:19
  • 3
    Note that speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com is just one specific Speedtest server. There are thousands of them all over the world, and depending on where you are located, testing with this one may or may not give you correct results. Speedtest.net choses the server closest to you automatically, which should be more relevant. Ideally, you should use your browser's Dev Tools to figure out the hostname/URL speedtest.net choses in your case and use that in the wget line above instead of speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com.
    – Kibber
    Mar 21, 2018 at 8:42
83

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

6
  • 7
    +1 iperf is fantastic for validating ethernet and WIFI speeds
    – kfmfe04
    May 22, 2013 at 10:19
  • 4
    iperf is great for LAN but the user is asking about WAN. Sep 11, 2018 at 12:22
  • 3
    Those of you who don't have a remote server you can connect to, there are publicly available iperf servers: iperf.cc Oct 14, 2019 at 10:28
  • 3
    speedtest is useless as most internet providers know their servers' addresses and prioritize them. I get results with iperf that are a 10th of what speedtest gives me. And those are the effective speeds I reach.
    – dargaud
    Mar 12, 2020 at 18:36
  • 3
    @dargaud Make sure you don't mix TCP speed with UDP speed. Most speed test tools measure UDP speed, but iperf measures TCP by default. Use iperf -u -c servername to measure UDP speed. The results of that will probably be very close to what speedtest gives you.
    – not2savvy
    May 9, 2022 at 9:45
38

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.

enter image description here

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:

enter image description here

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:

enter image description here

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.

9
  • 1
    wget is not (yet) able to do a segmented download, that is to download a single file using multiple (parallel) connections, so if your ISP is limiting the speed per 1 connection, you won't get accurate results... it would be a more precise test to use some other tool, that can at least use segmented download (like aria2)
    – Mladen B.
    Aug 7, 2013 at 9:21
  • 4
    This is NOT a speedtest, this is a DOWNLOAD speed test only! Internet speed test means down&up load! Second answer, and all others mentioning speedtest-cli have the correct approach. Jan 20, 2015 at 14:16
  • 2
    @EmilBorconi You are correct but in real life, we are not doing benchmarking Internet speeds here, this are just your average current speed tests of any home user without the need for sites like speedtest. A download speed (Which is enough for anyone trying to see if they are having a bottleneck) is a good enough test. A full down/up speed test would check what the full scope of your speed is based on your ISP. So yeah that would be the best solution, but for any fast test scenario, even a simple wget would do the trick since normally people worry more about download speed than upload. Jan 20, 2015 at 16:32
  • 1
    @LuisAlvarado sorry if I sounded rude, just I think people should be able to fully understand what they are asking / and what is the accepted answer. Lot's of newbies will look at forums and they will assume / pick / stop at the accepted answer, and they form a false image in their had. And yes download is more important then upload unless you are a facebook maniac who post selfies each 5 minutes, then start a fight with you ISP just because you tested the download which is good, but you have a crappy upload... Once again sorry if my tone was rude, did not want to insult... Jan 21, 2015 at 9:52
  • 1
    I like wget better than curl for this because wget displays MB/s (very clear that is MBytes/s), whereas curl just displays k (not very obvious that it is KBytes/s).
    – wisbucky
    Sep 18, 2019 at 22:48
21

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.

0
15

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.

1
  • Can't comment yet; for very limited situations: echo -e "Simple CLI Connection Speed Test\n================================" echo "Available file sizes (MB): 1, 4, 5, 10, 50, 100, 200, 400, 2000, 4000"; read -p "Choice: " size; downloadUrl=http://cachefly.cachefly.net/${size}mb.test echo -e "\nDonwload url: ${downloadUrl}\n" startTime=$(date +"%s"); wget $downloadUrl -O ->/dev/null; endTime=$(date +"%s"); totalTime=$(expr $(($endTime-$startTime))); echo -e "\nResults\n=======\nDownloaded in: $totalTime second(s)"; echo "Speed: $(expr 8 \* $size / $totalTime) Mbit/s";
    – cbaldan
    May 17, 2022 at 20:23
12

I happen to like the speedometer Ubuntu cli.

speedometer -r eth0

To watch a live graph of incoming data speeds.

3
  • thats actually what I was looking for for a while! thanks! but I dont like that it shows speeds in Kib and not Kb or KB
    – redbeam_
    Sep 24, 2016 at 19:06
  • @redbeam_ KiBs are easier to work with, because they're 2**10, rather than 10**3. May 1, 2022 at 15:11
  • @Sapphire_Brick that’s subjective and depends on the situation and context.
    – redbeam_
    May 1, 2022 at 16:45
7

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
2
  • This worked great as I'm testing from a stateless read-only rootFS and wget wasn't outputting the speed.
    – vhs
    Jun 18, 2018 at 18:31
  • As simple and barebones as it is, this might be the only option when you want to test connection speed but have limited Internet access to only one website.
    – undercat
    Mar 30, 2020 at 10:28
4

Actually, Ookla, the provider of Speedtest released a command-line utility that is measuring your speed against a huge number of servers spread around the world. You can find instructions on how to install it on this link and you can use it fairly simple by executing:

speedtest -s XXXX -f csv|tsv|jsonl|json|json-pretty

where -s sets the server ID against which you want to test your Internet speed, -f is defining the format of the output. I think the most useful information is generated when you use json/json-pretty format for the output because a lot of the information of the test setup isn't printed if you are using the csv/tsv format. Both -s and -f are just optional but if you want to automate your measurement they might be useful.

In addition, you can find a list of the servers which speedtest is using on this address in the form of an XML file or on this address with a searchable field: link.

3

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).

3
  • This would require of some server set up...
    – Braiam
    Sep 20, 2013 at 3:06
  • url_1,2,3,4 can be anything, such as public servers.
    – rexis
    Sep 20, 2013 at 3:27
  • for example timeout 5 wget http://speedtest.netcologne.de/test_100mb.bin -O /tmp/temp5sec then analyze the filesize and devide by 5: expr $(stat --printf="%s" /tmp/temp5sec) / 5 / 1024 in kbit/s
    – rubo77
    Aug 29, 2015 at 11:49
3

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 

enter image description here

for more info use :

 ./tespeed.py  -h

it will provide more option for speed test.

2
  • Note: requires lxml
    – Matt
    Feb 13, 2018 at 0:22
  • It returns an error: lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: Start tag expected, '<' not found, line 1, column 1
    – Alexis_A
    Jul 23, 2020 at 22:28
2

Simple bash script based on @rexis answer. You can put your own links for testing in links array or read them from file

#!/bin/bash
export LC_ALL=C  #make output in English eg for later use with "du | grep"

TMP_PATH=/tmp/speedtest_data/
TEST_TIME=5

rm -rf $TMP_PATH && mkdir $TMP_PATH

links=("http://client.cdn.gamigo.com/bp/eu/com/110a/BPClientSetup-2b.bin" "http://client.cdn.gamigo.com/bp/eu/com/110a/BPClientSetup-1b.bin" "http://client.cdn.gamigo.com/bp/eu/com/110a/BPClientSetup-1c.bin" "http://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/ubuntu-releases-dvd/quantal/release/ubuntu-12.10-server-armhf+omap.img" "http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/INSTALL/Ubuntu/dvd-releases/releases/12.10/release/ubuntu-12.10-server-armhf+omap.img" "http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux/opensuse/distribution/13.2/iso/openSUSE-13.2-DVD-x86_64.iso")

echo "Testing download"

for link in ${links[*]}
do
    timeout $TEST_TIME wget -q -P $TMP_PATH $link &
done

wait

total_bytes=$(du -c -b $TMP_PATH | grep total | awk '{print $1}')

echo "Cleaning up"
rm -rf $TMP_PATH

speed=$(echo "scale=2; $total_bytes / $TEST_TIME / 128" |bc)

echo "Speed is $speed Mbit/s"

exit 0
1
  • one minus - what about when i use other language as English ? see: grep :) part
    – ceph3us
    Mar 14, 2016 at 16:53
2

I wanted something more advanced than speedtest.net and various solutions that rely solely on a single website. So I did the thing I normally do and wrote my own solution:

https://github.com/cubiclesoft/network-speedtest-cli

From the features list:

  • SSH/SFTP (port 22) speed testing.
  • Common TCP ports 80, 443, and 8080 as well as random TCP port speed testing using a custom TCP/IP server that supports speeds up to 2.2 Gbps down and 780 Mbps up.
  • Fairly basic network latency testing.
  • Spin up Digital Ocean droplets and speed test SSH/SFTP and various TCP ports.
  • Speedtest.net and custom OoklaServer speed testing. Produces similar results to the single connection tests at single.speedtest.net.
  • Pure JSON output in silent mode (-s).

It's a more generic solution that can be consumed by other applications. I managed to pinpoint an ISP network issue with it that resulted in doubling my SFTP downstream speed, which resulted in increased happiness.

1

You can also try http://dl.getipaddr.net

They use curl (which is a well known command line utility) to run a speed test.

In short

wget https://raw.github.com/blackdotsh/curl-speedtest/master/speedtest.sh && chmod u+x speedtest.sh && bash speedtest.sh

1

To conveniently get my download speed in bits-per-second, I define the following in my $HOME/.bash_aliases file:

speed-test='wget --output-document=/dev/null --report-speed=bits http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip'

where:

--output-document=/dev/null effectively discards the wget output

--report-speed=bits displays the wget download speed average in bits-per-second (bps) instead the default bytes-per-second (Bps)

1

For charts + the 30,000 feet view of representative actual speeds

I was looking for:

  • A broad, multi-ISP, representative view of real-life speeds
  • Upload-speeds + round-trip latencies. Not just download speeds
  • Eliminate ISP bias and possible tricks they might play to make specific speed-tests appear faster than most other speeds are
  • High-level graphical output rather than just numbers. One picture is worth a 1000 words

Not being able to find anything that answered all these requirements, I wrote my own while avoiding reinventing the wheel wherever possible.

Under the hood, I used speedtest-cli for the ISP selection and the metrics, and R/ggplot for plotting. The code has been well tested on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 & 20.04.

The output provides the 3 main metrics (download, upload, and ping round-trip times) for the closest 20 data-centers to you (the tester), plus estimated distances and Internet provider names.

Source code

All the code is available from github with howto, examples & my story of looking for better speeds.

All this code is CLI based. The image viewer can also be called from the command line.

Example of the charts it generates

After a plan upgrade (DL-speeds are great, UL-speeds not so much)

results 2020-05-25

A manually annotated earlier test, testing a theory:

manually annotated earlier test

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .