Estimating network I/O speed using scp

Question

I want to have a rough estimate of the network I/O speed between two linux servers. The problem is that I don't have sudo access to the servers. So I tried transferring a 1GB file between the two servers using scp. I suppose that with the encryption there will be some slowdown. How much slowdown should I be expecting? Also can the scp bandwidth usage be capped by the server admin? How do I know if it is capped?

Answer 1

The encryption is normally not the bottleneck in a scp transfer, but you can use ftp instead.

My usual way is to open a Python web server on any directory on a certain port using this single command

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000  # python 2
python -m http.server 8000 # python 3

And on the other side just use wget to download it

wget http://[ip address]:8000/[some big file]

Any network activity could be limited by the server admin and the usual indicator is that your speed is maintained at a nice stable level (e.g. 500KB/s)