Progress is a small utility that implements a progress meter for Unix pipelines. If you have a command pipeline and you want to know the speed at which is is processing information, just plug progress in the middle. For example, when I use my httpget utility to download files off the web, I often use the command line:
httpget http://www.some.host/some/stuff | progress > stuff
Progress will just pass all data from it's standard input to it's standard output and display the total amount of data and time passed and the average speed of data.
Download the version 1.0 C source code.
Compile the source with command cc -O -o progress progress.c.
Copy the executable somewhere in your $PATH.
Progress is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
The only other implementation of the same idea that I know of is Pipe Viewer. It seems to be a bit more ambitious than my project.