Speed Testing and Throughput testing

Tue Nov 3 00:02:04 UTC 2009

On Mon, Nov 02, 2009 at 01:30:18PM -1000, Michael Painter wrote:
> Nathan Ward wrote:
> >On 3/11/2009, at 10:56 AM, Mark Urbach wrote:
> >
> >>Anyone have a good solution to get "accurate" speed results when
> >>testing at 10/100/1000 Ethernet speeds?
> 
> An NDT server?... such as:
> http://ndt.anl.gov:7123/

I just tested that server, and couldn't get any results which were even
vaguely close to accurate. Of course it probably didn't help that the
only routes I could find to the test server were either Chicago - Palo
Alto - Chicago or Chicago - Ashburn - Chicago, but this doesn't seem 
like it would ever be useful for testing gigabit anything.

For end user testing, I've actually seen reasonable results from
speedtest.net. http://www.speedtest.net/result/610596179.png for
example, better than ndt.anl.gov at any rate. :P

For quick and dirty high speed Internet testing up to a gigabit, this is
my favorite standby (it often helps to eliminate your local disk from 
the equation by writing the downloaded file to /dev/null too):

> fetch -o /dev/null http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
/dev/null                                     100% of  100 MB  102 MBps

But the best (and conveniently enough the most commonly used) tool for
in-depth high speed testing was already mentioned, iperf. Another useful
tool if you're trying to troubleshoot tcp issues is
http://www.tcptrace.org/.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)