Benchmarking LAN Network Connectivity in Linux

Using netcat:

on destination machine run this command:
(This tells netcat to open port 20000 and listen for connections.)

nc -l 20000 > /dev/null


on source machine execute this command:
(This command will transfer 30MB of data over the network (a blocksize of 1MB, and 30 blocks, is 30MB)


dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=30 | nc HERE.COMES.DEST.IP 20000



Once all data is transferred, you’ll get the output from the dd command, showing throughput:


30+0 records in
30+0 records out
31457280 bytes (31 MB) copied, 5.40742 s, 5.8 MB/s




source: http://techthrob.com/2014/01/benchmarking-lan-network-connectivity-in-linux/