How to stress test LAN

[GraySenshi]

Basically I setup a switch to my home network and wanted to see how many devices I could run before it starts to run slow and fail. Also wanted to test the wireless.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

NetCPS is a great utility for measuring TCP/IP throughput.

 

[jsmithepa]

How many clients are we talking about?

I dare say in a home environment, you don't worry running out of switch's backplane speed, but rather how (relatively slow) Internet is load-balanced between the clients.

 

[bill001g]

You likely would need very specialized testing equipment to really see if a switch could run at the speed it is rated by manufactures. Your ends devices likely would hit limits before a switch would.

Most modern switch even extremely inexpensive ones are called non blocking or wirespeed. What you will find is they have the ability to run every port at say 1g in and 1g out all at the same time. So a 24 port switch could pass 48gbit/sec of traffic. How you could actually test that I have no idea, almost no pc can really run its port that fast, they get very close but not quite to 100%.

Now if you get equipment that is say 5 or 10yrs old you might find something that is not wirespeed. Now the very latest 10g switches are not all wirespeed when you look one that have lots of ports. I suspect as the price of the asic chips come down all 10g switch will also go to wirespeed.