Purpose

Measure and display the rate of data across a network connection or data being stored in a file.

Source

Current version is 2.6

Version 2.6 browse code / download source / download tarball

Mercurial repository: https://excess.org/hg/speedometer/

Installation

Debian or Ubuntu

apt-get install speedometer

Others

Download and install Urwid (recommended).

Download the speedometer source.

As root issue the following commands in the directory that you downloaded the source file:

cp speedometer.py /usr/local/bin/speedometer
chown root: /usr/local/bin/speedometer
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/speedometer

Usage

Usage: speedometer [options] tap [[-c] tap]...
Monitor network traffic or speed/progress of a file transfer.  
At least one tap must be entered.  -c starts a new column, otherwise taps are piled  vertically.

Taps:   [-f] filename [size]        display download speed [with progress bar]
                               -f must be used if directly following another
                               file tap without an expected size specified
   -rx network-interface       display bytes received on network-interface
   -tx network-interface       display bytes transmitted on network-interface

Options:   -i interval-in-seconds      eg. "5" or "0.25"   default: "1"
   -p                          use plain-text display (one tap only)
   -b                          use old blocky display instead of smoothed
                               display even when UTF-8 encoding is detected
   -z                          report zero size on files that don't exist
                               instead of waiting for them to be created

Usage Examples

How long it will take for my 38MB transfer to finish?

speedometer favorite_episode.rm $((38*1024*1024))

How quickly is another transfer going?

speedometer dl/big.avi

How fast is this LAN?

host-a$ cat /dev/zero | nc -l -p 12345

host-b$ nc host-a 12345 > /dev/null 
host-b$ speedometer -rx eth0

How fast is the upstream on this ADSL line?

speedometer -tx ppp0

How fast can I write data to my filesystem? (with at least 1GB free)

dd bs=1000000 count=1000 if=/dev/zero of=big_nothing &
speedometer big_nothing