gigbit lan speed testing utility?

J

jfharper

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2005
Messages
166
I am setting up a new gigbit lan and wanted to test the transfer rate between a main workstation and some other systems that will be 3d render slaves, to see if the transfer is up to gigbit speed...the reason I'm asking is one of my cables from the workstation to the switch box (the switch is gigbit) is only cat 5 I think...but the cables to the other sysems are 5e...I should have bought one more cable, but i forgot, and I live 30min away from the nearest store, but if there was a small utility i could download to test, that would be great...maybe the cat5 cable is able to handle the gigabit speed...it is only 6 feet long...anyone know of a small utility like this? thanks.
 
There are lots of utilties... iperf comes to mind as one that is usually recommended. If you get 300 megabits/sec or so, be happy.. no one realy gets 1000 megabits/sec on a GigE link.
 
writing to my SAN over gigabit copper (iSCSI) to a raid6 array, I can get about 98MB/s without jumbo frames. For a simple test, try FTP. it'll eat up a lot of the bw pretty well.
 
The problem with FTP (and moving files around) is that the files have to come from/go to somewhere; your'll find that the speed of your hard drive limits the results you get.

iperf and the like read/write from RAM, and so their results aren't impacted by the speed of your disc subsystem.
 
k...i actually found a tester in sandra...so I tested and I got around 37MB/sec...is that good considering my HD is SATA 150 and my MB is SATA 2.0, Biostar t-force 6100-939?
 
You can get MUCH higher then your hard drive speed if you are delivering content that is cached in ram. I have single machines in operation that push over 600mbit+ sustained useage over a cat5 cable and a gigE fiber uplink.
 
Fint said:
There are lots of utilties... iperf comes to mind as one that is usually recommended. If you get 300 megabits/sec or so, be happy.. no one realy gets 1000 megabits/sec on a GigE link.
Click to expand...

sorry for bumping this thread... but 1000mbit is possible:)
writing to a RAM disk on the other machine the HDD bottleneck is removed... result: 111.9Mb/s

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No, but 125 is.

Ive seen 122 sustained on my network for large file transfers. It is possible
 
da sponge said:
writing to my SAN over gigabit copper (iSCSI) to a raid6 array, I can get about 98MB/s without jumbo frames. For a simple test, try FTP. it'll eat up a lot of the bw pretty well.
Click to expand...

That's about as good as I have ever gotten as well, 90-100MB/s on an enterprise iSCSI SAN.

I like IoMeter for testing, but I live in the iSCSI world YMMV.
 
Fint said:
There are lots of utilties... iperf comes to mind as one that is usually recommended. If you get 300 megabits/sec or so, be happy.. no one realy gets 1000 megabits/sec on a GigE link.
Click to expand...

I also suggest iperf, version 1.7, with the following sort of command line options:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

E.g.

F:\tools\bench\iperf>iperf -c vista-p5q -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to vista-p5q, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------

[608] local 192.168.0.147 port 33286 connected with 192.168.0.187 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[608] 0.0- 3.0 sec 370 MBytes 987 Mbits/sec
[608] 3.0- 6.0 sec 369 MBytes 984 Mbits/sec
[608] 6.0- 9.0 sec 369 MBytes 985 Mbits/sec
[608] 9.0-12.0 sec 369 MBytes 983 Mbits/sec
[608] 12.0-15.0 sec 369 MBytes 983 Mbits/sec
[608] 0.0-15.0 sec 1.85 GBytes 983 Mbits/sec
[580] local 192.168.0.147 port 5001 connected with 192.168.0.187 port 49196
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[580] 0.0- 3.0 sec 370 MBytes 987 Mbits/sec
[580] 3.0- 6.0 sec 369 MBytes 983 Mbits/sec
[580] 6.0- 9.0 sec 369 MBytes 983 Mbits/sec
[580] 9.0-12.0 sec 369 MBytes 983 Mbits/sec
[580] 0.0-15.0 sec 1.84 GBytes 983 Mbits/sec
Click to expand...

The above results were from on-board nVIDIA to on-board Atheros using consumer hardware and Windows OS's. Slightly better results can be obtained, but it really doesn't matter much at this point.

IME, around 950 Mb/s is often achievable with modern gear.

File transfers is another kettle of fish, and much more difficult to optimize, but I've also sustained around 115 MB/s for very large file transfers with consumer gear.
 
JMke said:
1000Mb/s is 10Gbit...
Click to expand...
No. 1,000Mb/s is 1Gb/s. 10,000Mb/s is 10Gb/s.

Edit:
If you want to get technical:
1 gigabit = 0.125 gigabytes = 1,024 megabits = 128 megabytes
10 gigabit = 1.25 gigabytes = 10,240 megabits = 1280 megabytes
 
Last edited:
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