Intranet speed test

Question

Does anybody know of any internal intranet bandwidth test applications I can install on our internal servers?

I would like to test the speed of our WAN links like those online boradband speedometers do.

We run IIS7 on Windows 2008.

Solution 1

I like NDT (http://www.internet2.edu/performance/ndt/index.html). There is even a livecd of this available. So you don't really have to do much to try this.

Another alternative would be to setup Iperf (http://iperf.sourceforge.net/). You could simply start up on a server in deamon mode and then connect to it from your clients. There isn't really a nice web interface or anything though.

Solution 2

The same company that makes those speed test apps, Ookla, also has a free version, which has been replaced with Speedtest Custom.

Solution 3

It's pretty low-tech, but using "wget" to download a large file from HTTP servers hosted on your WAN would be a fairly simple way to test, assuming that your WAN infrastructure isn't so fast that a single transfer can't saturate it.

"Measure it 20 times, and take the mean..." (as one of my EE buddies always likes to say...)

Speed tests are nice for gauging theoretical maximum bandwidth, but you're better off investing your time in a monitoring infrastructure (Cacti, et. al.) to keep abreast of the realtime and historical bandwidth utilization trends in your network. Knowing how fast the network can move bits doesn't tell you much if you don't know how many bits are moving across it.

Comments

[Ryan Ferretti]

Or download a really big file and see where it settles down. We did this with a couple of really big AVI files we found on the network. Made them into one massive RAR then started moving them around the network.

[RainyRat]

+1 for IPerf, but remember to test UDP and TCP performance, as there can be a significant difference.

[churnd]

+2 for iPerf. Use JPerf with it: code.google.com/p/xjperf

[SteveBurkett]

+1 for JPerf, makes iPerf very eary to set up and use with it's nice Java GUI.