Speed Testing and Throughput testing

[nanog at daork.net (Nathan Ward)]

On 3/11/2009, at 10:56 AM, Mark Urbach wrote:

> Anyone have a good solution to get "accurate" speed results when  
> testing at 10/100/1000 Ethernet speeds?

If you want accuracy, you want to buy a packet generator/router tester  
unit.

I just built a tool for a customer (a last-mile network provider) that  
runs a series of iperf tests over several days, and generates a report.
iperf works well enough, but it seems to be much better when driven by  
humans, vs. driven by scripts.

I'm not aware of any free tools that do just ethernet frames.

> Do you have a server/software that customer can test too?

Not sure what you're after here - do you want to host your own  
speedtest.net-like service so your customers can self-test their  
access links? Does this mean much, or should they be testing against a  
server outside your network?
Also, if you host your own service and you're talking about  
10/100/1000mbit connections, you might want to put something in place  
that prevents several people testing at once.

--
Nathan Ward