Test Internet Speed from the Command Line (cli)

Today, I needed to see what the downstream was like for a server I help maintain. Usually in Windows I would go to SpeedTest.net and see what it was, but this isn’t going to easily work on a CentOS server. What to do?

I found the below snippet on askubuntu.com and it worked like a champ!

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

No file is saved on the server, as it’s outputted to /dev/null, and I could easily see what the average was over a short period of time.

Thanks to the original poster for a great snippet!