Good program for testing LAN speed
 

Does anyone know of a good program to test LAN speed? I've heard of one made by Unisys called SoftCAR or something like that, but I can't ever find it.

Joseph

You could just copy some files over it.

But then I wouldn't get the speed (or exact speed...)

Joseph

Actaully it can, run the performance monitor in WinXP and see how many bytes per second Windows is writing. If you have 1Mbps LAN, it should top out at 125KBps; 10Mbps, 1.25MBps; 100Mbps, 12.5MBps; 1Gbps, 125MBps; and finally 10Gbps, 1.25GBps.

What the fuck, you shouldn't even need this.

You clearly know what the maximum speed of LAN is. Is that somehow not good enough for you to know?

It'll be somewhere around 10, 11, 56, or 100 Mbps, depending on the hardware. Again, how is that not good enough?

To be fair sometimes a network interface can have considerably lower speed than what it should. But the difference cannot possibly be enough to matter to someone who doesn't know how to test speeds.

Copying a large file is a great way to test the speed. Pinging gives you a quicker answer as well. (From the command line "Ping 192.168.109.2"*, it'll give you the time it took for a network signal to get from your machine to the other and back, giving you an idea of network lag which isn't really shown with the sustained file transfer.

*Use the IP address of the machine you want to ping, the number provided is just an example.

I make my own cable. I hear that if you make your own, there is a chance that your entire network speed may lower!
Geez!

Joseph

I fail to see how this is true. (Not all the pins in an RJ-45 are used anyway.) If signals can be sent from one end of the cable to another, you're fine; speed isn't going to decrease because the wire pairs don't perfectly fit into the connector.

The maximum theoretical throughput (speed) for a 100 Mb link is 12.5 MB/sec. However, this does not mean that the speed will be such; overhead, for one, must be taken into account.
On most LANs, pinging--unless clients are connected through multiple decvices--will not give any accurate example of actual speed, since the average ping packet is small and, thereby, easy to transmit very quickly. (Pinging in those situation mostly returns response times of "less than a millisecond," which doesn't provide a good indication.) That is, very small transfers across a fast link are rarely a good measure of the actual throughput.

I don't know why you'd be concerned about data transfer speeds over a home LAN, however. Such is rarely ever a problem: it would be hard to completely saturate the link.

The only time this is the case is with Cat6/Gigabit networks. And the difference you can incurr is relatively minor, and due to putting undue stress on the cable. Also, if you make your cables too long for any network cable you'll start to run into speed issues as frames are lost. A big chunky file transfer is the way to go.