Netgear → Re: Networking

Have you tried using FTP from one PC to the other? You could FTP a known file (say 100MB worth) and see how long it takes. FTP will tell you the time it took and how much data (size in Bytes) that was transfered. After that it's just a matter of division to get your Bytes (or Bits) per second.

Hope this helps.

Keep in mind that ftp'ing also takes into account time spent writing to disk and there's a chance that disk I/O is the bottleneck. If you are measuring how fast you can transfer files, this would be ok but if you are trying to measure how many bits you can fling across the network, using ftp in this manner won't do.

If you have a UNIX machine, you can ftp into it and do a 'put' and send the file to /dev/null. This should just throw the bytes away and take disk I/O out of the picture.

I haven't tried any of the tools listed here but I would guess that they would be better tests of raw network throughput as they probably won't have the protocol overhead in ftp, but that's only a guess.