Testing LAN speed between two points.

[Arika]

Now that i finally have my own house i can actually do the things i want now instead of worrying about renting and moving.

 

Theres a few points in my house where there is going to be a computer of some description, whether ir be a HTPC, Laptop, desktop, NAS etc that are all going to be connected through ethernet. some will be powerline adapters and some will be jsut directly connected to a central switch.

 

What software could i use to determine the line speed between two points in the house? 

 

For example. 

2 computers directly connected to the switch should be getting the full gigabit (or close enough to) of the switches throughput

or

1 computer connected to the gigabit switch which then goes to the powerline should in theory be getting about 500mbps between the computer and the HTPC as thats the rated speed of the power line.

[manikyath]

6 minutes ago, Sierra Fox said:

the powerline should in theory be getting about 500mbps

nice theory man.

 

you can just do SMB file transfers to get a rough but good enough idea.

[Arika]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

nice theory man.

 

you can just do SMB file transfers to get a rough but good enough idea.

well it looks good on paper

 

yeah that was going to be what i would fall back to if there was no decent network benchmark software for quick testing.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Sierra Fox said:

well it looks good on paper

 

yeah that was going to be what i would fall back to if there was no decent network benchmark software for quick testing.

for your home network there's honestly not much use for network benchmarking software, all that matters is the amount of data you can push

 

on the WAN side of things tho.. having speedtest is a really nice tool to shout at your ISP with

[Arika]

9 minutes ago, manikyath said:

on the WAN side of things tho.. having speedtest is a really nice tool to shout at your ISP with

my 8mbps down cries at speedtest

[Falconevo]

iperf, its built for network performance testing and works across multiple operating systems.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf2/

 

 

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, Falconevo said:

iperf, its built for network performance testing and works across multiple operating systems.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf2/

 

 

Iperf is great.

 

Orrrrr........

 

Invest a few hundred thousand dollars in some nice Spirent gear >.>  

[Catsrules]

18 hours ago, manikyath said:

nice theory man.

 

you can just do SMB file transfers to get a rough but good enough idea.

That is what I use.
Just some tips for SMB speed tests.

1) Use 1 large file. (I recommend a video file 1GB or greater If you don't have a file just youtube-dl the latest WAN show or something.)
2) Don't use hard drives (Hard drives can be a bottleneck on gigabit file copies. I would recommend copying SSD to SSD. Me for example I copy from my SSD on my desktop to  my SSD on my laptop. Or even better create a Ram disk on both computers.

3) Disable/disconnect all network cards except the ones your using on the two computers. (SMB/windows is stupid it will use what ever network it connected to first. I can't tell you how many times I have plugged in Ethernet cable to my laptop to start a file copy only to realize it is still using the wireless connection.)     

4) Remember windows file copy will is using MBps. not mbsp. 125MBps is the max you will ever get on a gigabit connection. I have never seen 125MBps it before most SMB copies I do hang around 115MBps.