If you want to do an ongoing speedtest with graphs for up- and download, forget about the web-based tools like speedtest.net and fast.com - those are nice if you are on a mobile phone. These speedtests as a service will not show you continuous graphs (which sometime you might want to have if you are tweaking your network).

On such occasions, your *nix shell yields better tooling!

First, fire up a Terminal and start nload to view network traffic. If you are on macOS, you can also use the graphical tool activity monitor.

nload

Then, in a second Terminal, start a permanent upload or download with the following commands:

Upload

ssh lafo@dublin.zhaw.ch "cat /dev/urandom" > /dev/null

Download

cat /dev/urandom| ssh lafo@dublin.zhaw.ch "cat > /dev/null"

Note that depending on your ssh configuration, you might need to disable compression on the client or server side.