*24 Jan 2015* <div class="posthaven-post-body"> Here's a neat trick: Measuring your Internet download speed from the command line. Basically you need wget to download a big file (download to /dev/null will not waste disk space ;)) and simply check the average speed at the end. Something like: wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com/downloads/test10.zip Will give you: Resolving speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com... 159.253.132.18 Connecting to speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com\|159.253.132.18\|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 11536384 (11M) \[application/zip\] Saving to: ‘/dev/null’ 100%\[====================================================================================================================================================================================================================================\>\] 11,536,384 897KB/s in 13s 2013-09-05 17:36:36 (901 KB/s) - ‘/dev/null’ saved \[11536384/11536384\] In this case, my download speed was 901KB/s. But it gets better: Since you might not be near the server i am using to test, you can pick a closer one. Just replace the "ams01" part of the url with one of the \[servers on this page\](http://speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com/speedtest/). For simplicity, i've compiled a list: \- Amsterdam, The Netherlands: \*\*ams01\*\* (the one used in my test) - Singapore, Singapore: \*\*sng01\*\* - Seattle, USA: \*\*sea01\*\* - San Francisco, USA: \*\*sjc01\*\* - Dalas, USA: \*\*dal01\*\* - Dalas, USA: \*\*dal05\*\* - Dalas, USA: \*\*dal07\*\* - Houson, USA: \*\*hou02\*\* - Washington DC, USA: \*\*wdc01\*\* So for example - if you live near San Francisco - use "http://speedtest.\*\*sjc01\*\*.softlayer.com/downloads/test10.zip" as the url (notice the change in bold). \*\*Bonus:\*\* Create a shell alias and you can call the speed test anytime using - well - "speedtest". Here's an example for the FiSH shell and bash. FiSH: Add to your \*\*config.fish\*\* function speedtest; wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com/downloads/test10.zip; end BASH: Add to your \*\*.bash_profile\*\* alias speedtest='wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.ams01.softlayer.com/downloads/test10.zip' Happy (fast) Interneting. </div> [[tags/command_line|command_line]] [[tags/internet|internet]] [[tags/measure|measure]] [[tags/speed|speed]] [[tags/test|test]]