[NCLUG] measuring LAN connection speed

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Herrington <danielh at ftc.agilent.com> writes:

Daniel> What command can I use to measure the speed of my 10/100 cards
Daniel> & switch?  

ftp binary transfers are the quick and dirty way to do it.  the
"/dev/zero" thing is to make up for slow disk subsystems; on my VIA
boards (with DMA currently disabled, grumble) i rarely get more than
3MB/s off the hard disk.

Daniel> I seem to recall something about catting to /dev/null from the
Daniel> opposite machine's disk, and from /dev/zero or something to
Daniel> the other machine's disk.

if you're using NFS to share the disk, this technique should work.
i'd be mildly surprised if NFS can squeeze out the same throughput of
TCP over the same network, though.

Daniel> I'm wanting to set up a file server that will have decent disk
Daniel> speed for video capture from another machine (which has an old
Daniel> and slow drive/controller).  I need at least 5-6MB/sec, so
Daniel> 10-BaseT won't cut it.  I need to verify that I can get that
Daniel> kind of speed with my 10/100 stuff and nfs.

a similar thread popped up on the BLUG (boulder, co, LUG) list a few
weeks back.  take a look at:

   http://archive.lug.boulder.co.us/bymonth/2001.07/msg00116.html

and subsequent articles in that thread.  it will probably answer most
of your questions.

t.