[Howto] Quick & dirty Speedtest DL+UL from CLI with no tools/packages required

[Rico]

Curious everybody knows you can do Speedtests from the pfSense CLI for Download AND Upload just out of the box without installing any packages or tools? :-)
YES we all know speed testing should be done from a client behind the Firewall because pfSense is not optimized to act as a client.
But for a quick check to see the new pipe really provide 100/50Mbps it's handy. If you see lower bandwidth as expected use a client behind pfSense to recheck!

For downloading we use fetch, the full command looks like this:
fetch -o /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
and the output after downloading the 1GB file:
/dev/null 1024 MB 32 MBps 31s

While downloading I also like to check the traffic from the pfSense WebGUI in Status > Traffic Graph

Tele2 provides different filesizes for download testing:

http://speedtest.tele2.net/1MB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/10MB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/100MB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/10GB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/50GB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/100GB.zip
http://speedtest.tele2.net/1000GB.zip

If Tele2 does not work for you, try other Speedtests like BelWue:

http://speedtest.belwue.net/100M
http://speedtest.belwue.net/1G
http://speedtest.belwue.net/10G
http://speedtest.belwue.net/100G
http://speedtest.belwue.net/1000G

Surely there are many other Speedtests around providing pure testfiles, would be nice if we could collect some in this thread.
With really beefy pipes you probably need to open multiple CLIs and run tests simultaneously against different servers.

For testing the upload speed we use curl. Full command is
curl -T /dev/random ftp://speedtest.tele2.net/upload/
and the output

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  368M    0     0    0  368M      0  5975k --:--:--  0:01:03 --:--:-- 4739k

Because we use /dev/random as source this test runs indefinitely, hitting CTRL+C stops uploading and show the stats.
In place of /dev/random you could also upload any other file, maybe grab one of the 1GB testfiles from the download test. Due to small disk size of most pfSense installations I like to use simply /dev/random.
Same as for download speedtests, would be nice to collect some upload servers here.

Happy testing. :-)

-Rico