Over the weekend, I tested the capabilities of my newly operating LAN. I read an article on lifehacker about a program designed to test the speed of your home network. This article basically shouted “try me.” And so I did.
While my LAN should theoretically be gigabit in speed, it has been almost impossible for me to find what exactly gigabit is. The only absolute I can find is that the term gigabit means 1 billion bits. The problem is finding the context of that. What is truly considered a gigabit network?
This program creates a file on another computer on your network and calculates the data for you. I sent 1 gigabyte files to my server and HTPC. By sending this large of a file, it tests more than speed, but throughput of the network. Every computer on my network has a gigabit network card except for my server, which has a 10/100 network card. This is where I’m somewhat confused, as the results were somewhat similar for both machines.
Results:
Server
| —Writing— | —Reading— | |
| Packet length : | 1,048,576,000 | 1,048,576,000 |
| Time to complete: | 98.0580000 | 148.7040000 |
| Bytes per second: | 10,693,426 | 7,051,431 |
| Bits per second : | 85,547,408 | 56,411,448 |
| ————- | ————- | |
| Mbps: | 81.5843658 | 53.7981491 |
HTPC
| —Writing— | —Reading— | |
| Packet length : | 1,048,576,000 | 1,048,576,000 |
| Time to complete: | 92.2800000 | 92.9600000 |
| Bytes per second: | 11,362,982 | 11,279,862 |
| Bits per second : | 90,903,856 | 90,238,896 |
| ————- | ————- | |
| Mbps: | 86.6926727 | 86.0585175 |
What I’d really like to find out is if these numbers are “in line” with what a cat5e LAN with a gigabit router and gigabit switch should be.
While I’ve done a fair amount of “googling” this, I haven’t found any information that hits a home run. Most of what I’ve found is out of date, or goes off on a tangent in a completely different direction.
If you happen upon this blog and are a network engineer, or knowledgeable on this subject, please let me know!