2010/09/05

Testing Local Area Network speeds with Ubuntu Linux

This is a draft and I am still working on this post.

I am trying to learn how to test my local area network at home (LAN). I am running Ubuntu 10.04 as an NFS version 3 server. My file transfer speeds are slow between my linux netbook (Ubuntu 10.04) and my wife's Macbook pro running Snow Leopard. This will detail my attempt at trouble shooting my LAN. I have only been using Ubuntu exclusively since the beginning of the year having switched from XP. My server has 2 GB of memory running an AMD athlon 64 x2 3600+ with several Terrabytes of storage.

I am following this thread and used the program iperf to check network speeds.
iperf is run from the command line and can be found in the Ubuntu repositories. Typing 'man iperf' will explain the options for iperf.


On my server using iperf to run in server mode
Code: iperf -s

On my netbook running as a client

Code: iperf -c 192.168.1.3 -d -o ~/netbook.wifi-g.txt

Options explained
  -c <host> = run in client mode connecting to 'host' which is the name or ip address of the server
  -d = do a bidirectional test
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nhfsstone - Network File System benchmark program

nfsstat - list NFS statistics

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 from miegiel http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=514319

Make sure you're not confusing Mbits and Mbytes. For you network 1byte = 8bit. So a 100Mbit network connection will never let you transfer at a speed greater than 12.5 Mbyte/s. However protocol overhead can account for another 10% speed loss, depending on the used network protocol. In general 10Mbyte/s is a good speed on a 100Mbit/s network.

ps. Your file browser will probably give you a speed in (M,k) bytes.

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