Measuring Network Speeds with Netcat and Dd

Measuring Network Speeds with Netcat and Dd

I've seen a few posts on the web about testing your network speeds with netcat, but they all seem to not work with recent versions of netcat.

On one machine, run:

nc -v -l 2222 > /dev/null


(Make sure you're not blocking connections to 2222!)

On a second machine, run:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024K count=512 | nc -v $IP_OF_FIRST_MACHINE 2222


dd will give you your speed:

536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 4.87526 s, 117 MB/s


Yay, gigabit!

ymmv, test with /dev/zero at your own risk. Speak with your NOC before starting any network infrastructure changes.

http://blog.repl.ca/2010/10/measuring-network-speeds-with-netcat.html