How to test local network speed?

Hi everyone. I wonder if there is any free application which would help me monitor my local area connection speed while transfering files from one pc to another. I use suse 11.1 Any advice would be highly appreciated.

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Most applications that transfer files will give you an estimate of speed
as they transfer. Having something do this for the whole system would
be a bit tricky since it’d be difficult to limit traffic over one socket
from all other traffic (potentially hundreds or thousands of
simultaneous transfers), plus ICMP, non-IP-based protocols, broadcasts
from other machines, etc.). For example when copying via ‘scp’ (Secure
Copy… part of SSH) I get an estimate of current transfer speed. FTP
is similar, in a way. ‘wget’ and ‘curl’ both give estimates.
Azureus/Vuze (torrents) provide estimates per remote machine.

Good luck.

arcull wrote:
> Hi everyone. I wonder if there is any free application which would help
> me monitor my local area connection speed while transfering files from
> one pc to another. I use suse 11.1 Any advice would be highly
> appreciated.
>
>
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knemo might be a choice, but it’s not avail in the 11.1 repo’s yet I think. Usually in Packman.

You could possibly download the source and build from that.

Thanks guys, I know applications mostly tell you cca how much time it remains while copying files, but I would like to do some tests of speed on my wire and wireless connection, just out of curiosity, to know how much they differ :). I’ll try to get knemo working on suse 11.1 :slight_smile:

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A way you could do this is with something like dd and netcat. Assuming
you have opened port 12345 on box1 and both boxes are Linux try the
following:

#box1
netcat -z -l -p 12345 | dd of=/dev/null

#box2
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000 count=1000000 |netcat -v localhost 12345

‘box1’ will then output the speed stuff for you, and this will be
independent of everything except the OS and network.

Good luck.

arcull wrote:
> Thanks guys, I know applications mostly tell you cca how much time it
> remains while copying files, but I would like to do some tests of speed
> on my wire and wireless connection, just out of curiosity, to know how
> much they differ :). I’ll try to get knemo working on suse 11.1 :slight_smile:
>
>
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Thanks ab@novell.com, I’ll give it a try :slight_smile:

You can use “iperf” to test (http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:FenixNBK/openSUSE_11.1/iperf.ymp) or use iptraf to monitor (zypper install iptraf).

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I really probably should mention that the set of commands I posted will
send a gigabyte of data across your network. If you’re not testing at
least a full 10 Mbit network you’ll probably want to cut that back a
bit. The 1000 is the “block size” (number bytes per “block”) and the
1000000 is the number of times to send that block so the multiple
created is the number of bytes sent, in this case one billion.

Good luck.

arcull wrote:
> Thanks ab@novell.com, I’ll give it a try :slight_smile:
>
>
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