Wednesday, January 6, 2010

How to Test Bandwidth Between Two Windows Computers

In this post we will be looking at a handy little tool called IPerf which can be downloaded from here:

http://www.noc.ucf.edu/Tools/Iperf/iperf.exe

This was recommended to me by the network engineers at work as being one of the fastest and efficient ways to measuring bandwidth on a link. IPerf does not have to be installed, it runs simply in a command prompt window. You need to setup IPerf on both ends to perform testing.

To use IPerf to test your network speed perform the following:

On one end run IPerf as the server:

iperf -s



On the other end run IPerf as the client including the name or ip address of the iperf server.

iperf -c 10.10.9.39



Here we can see we are getting 8.93mbps over the link to my other end.

Another handy trick is you can test bandiwidth both ways by using the -d switch for duel-test. This should be done if your network is full duplex only! If your running half-duplex this is not a good test to do!

iperf -c 10.10.9.39 -d



This testing was done over an MPLS cloud!

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for this post... Great tool!

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  2. How to Test Bandiwidth Between Two Windows Computers Really? You don't have spell check?

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  3. Super little tool. Thank you.

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  4. Once again your blog helps me out a ton! Just an FYI, the link you have up there is dead as of this post. Here's a direct link: http://iperf.fr/

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  5. Thanks for this post! I'm not a network guy, just a developer trying to track down some performance issues, so I have a question. You say "If your running half-duplex this is not a good test to do!". Does that mean merely that the results will be invalid or can it cause some situation (like a race condition) that is bad news for your servers?

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  6. It has Xperf which easier & graphical

    https://code.google.com/p/xjperf/downloads/list

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