So you have that new gigabit switch and think you are going to achieve 1 Gbps? We all know that you are not going to get 100% throughput due to limitations I will not go into. There could also be a 10⁄100 patch panel involved that is not rated for gigabit… but, I digress.
I use pipe viewer and netcat to answer this question. To start you will need to install both of these programs and open an available port on the server firewall. I used tcp port 2222 in this example.
First, this command will wait for the client to connect.
[user@server ~]$ nc -l 2222 > /dev/null
Next, this command will tell you the speed in MB/s after a couple of seconds.
[user@client ~]$ pv /dev/zero | nc server 2222 1.09GB 0:00:10 [ 113MB/s] [ <=> ]
Now we do some math and get this value (I like to use google for this):
Roughly 90% throughput on a gigabit switch isn’t too shabby! I did some more testing and have seen variances from 480 Mbps (60 MB/s) up to 912 Mbps (114 MB/s).
So the question still remains… How fast is your network?
