1
I am interested in knowing the maximum bandwith of our network. Can I use some freely downloadable utility or tool to find out if my intranet is 100BASET or 1000BASET, etc. or what is the maximum traffic it will allow ?
Is it possible for a programmer to know the network capacity?
Answers
2
on some operating sytems you can query the speed of the local NIC, but to know possible throughput of the rest of the network (switches, servers, internet conentcion, etc), you would need to speed test by doing a variety(*) of transfers.
The network admin may be also able to tell you and you may also be able to try and request a certain throughput using QoS, but both these methods in my experience tend to be unreliable
(*) eg, try non compressable data vs compressable data (VPNs often compress data). also try small blocks to see if there are latency issues, and of course try a simple large single stream. maybe also multiple streams .... etc.
SteelBytes
Posted 2011-03-30T00:25:36.397
Reputation: 121
2Before running something like a bandwidth test, make sure to ask the sysadmin first since you will light up flags on the monitoring software for bytes consumed and for bandwidth consumed. Here we get visits from them asking "Are you streaming? Are you using bit-torrent? Do you have a virus? Are you spamming..." Very good way to get the wrong kind of attention. – Blackbeagle – 2011-03-30T02:40:11.337
What operating system? – None – 2011-03-30T00:28:40.700
1Run a simple file transfer over ftp, ssh or http. Your network will be a bottleneck assuming you have a decent computer. – Zepplock – 2011-03-30T00:30:44.857
1Programmer do sometimes talk to LAN administrators. – Hans Passant – 2011-03-30T01:04:20.120
will netperf work in windows, and from a non-admin user? – None – 2011-03-30T01:23:26.983