I’ve always used speedtest.net or speedtest.comcast.net etc to test the speed of my internet connection. Unfortunately this requires a browser that supports java/flash/html5/images etc. What about my linux based servers without a GUI?

Author Sivel made speedtest.cli in python. https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli

wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli
./speedtest-cli