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
.
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.