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?
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)