Question Is there any good software to show the actual network speed of the devices on my lan?

[CurtisWalter]

I just upgraded my router to a Netgear Nighthawk AC1750 and upgraded my cables to either CAT5e or CAT6 and upgraded my 2 switches, a Netgear Prosafe 8 port GS108 in my office and at my entertainment center 60' away, (cat5e), a 5 port Netgear Prosafe GS 105. I have the switches plugged directly to the router. I still am getting PC Win 10 to PC Win 7, from my desk to the entertainment center, transfer speeds of 22-23Mb/s over the long CAT5e cable. Everything is Gb rated AFAIK. Is there any free software that can show my the network speeds of the devices connected to my network such as the switches, blu-ray player, Dish box, TV, etc? To possibly show me the bottleneck?

I even attached an USB 3 8Tb Seagate Expansion Drive to the router and using \\readyshare can transfer from the Win 7 laptop to it at only 22-23Mb/s. Data speed copying a 1.87Gb movie from my Win 10 pc directly to the NAS HD maxes out at 34Mb/s across a 15' CAT6 cable directly connected to the router.

My network adapter on my win 10 is an Intel 82567V-2 Gigabit Adapter and on the win 7 laptop it is a Broadcom NetLink Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

 

[jsmithepa]

I don't have a magic software for you for it may not be necessary.

When we talk about 1 gig speed, we are talking ETHERNET, anytime WIFI is in the path, your effective speed will slowed down by WIFI and we walk into a separate category.

Ethernet speed is found by simply LOOKING at the LEDs of the switch port, it tells you whether you are connected 1000 or 100/10 speeds. Just look that's all u have to do.

USB ports on routers for attached storage is a poor man's solution. It may says it's USB3 but you are dreaming if u expect USB3 speed out of it.

The only way, really, to measure end-go-end speed is to start a file transfer and a stopwatch, 'cuz different segment(s) of the highway can run at different speeds.

 

[bill001g]

The network tab of your event monitor will show the rates of all the open sessions. Be careful some things on the screen are in bytes and others in bits.

Although they make switches that show the data rate on the ports this is more a function of a commercial switch. The so called smart switches are getting better and better so maybe one of them has it but I can't say which. It is not a feature many home user even think about so you do not see it. Your switches are unmanged so you would have to buy something else.


If you had said I am getting 10-12mbytes/sec then I would suspect you have a port or cable issue. That is pretty close to 100mbits/sec. At 22mbtes is 176mbits which is over 100mbit which means all the ports are running at gigabit speeds.

Although you might be getting errors on the ports it is highly unlikely.

It almost has to be in the software and/or the drives themselves. USB stuff is kinda slow especially hooked to a router that is not primarily designed as a NAS. Look at the performance tables on this site where they test disk drives and SSD. Most are much higher than you see but many are still much slower than a gigabit cable.

 

[CurtisWalter]

I don't have a magic software for you for it may not be necessary.

When we talk about 1 gig speed, we are talking ETHERNET, anytime WIFI is in the path, your effective speed will slowed down by WIFI and we walk into a separate category.

Ethernet speed is found by simply LOOKING at the LEDs of the switch port, it tells you whether you are connected 1000 or 100/10 speeds. Just look that's all u have to do.

USB ports on routers for attached storage is a poor man's solution. It may says it's USB3 but you are dreaming if u expect USB3 speed out of it.

The only way, really, to measure end-go-end speed is to start a file transfer and a stopwatch, 'cuz different segment(s) of the highway can run at different speeds.

I am only using wired ethernet and my router and switches all show 2 lights on the lines hooked up to Gbit. I do have 3 printers that only have 1 light, but they are old and work fine.

 

[CurtisWalter]

The network tab of your event monitor will show the rates of all the open sessions. Be careful some things on the screen are in bytes and others in bits.

Although they make switches that show the data rate on the ports this is more a function of a commercial switch. The so called smart switches are getting better and better so maybe one of them has it but I can't say which. It is not a feature many home user even think about so you do not see it. Your switches are unmanged so you would have to buy something else.


If you had said I am getting 10-12mbytes/sec then I would suspect you have a port or cable issue. That is pretty close to 100mbits/sec. At 22mbtes is 176mbits which is over 100mbit which means all the ports are running at gigabit speeds.

Although you might be getting errors on the ports it is highly unlikely.

It almost has to be in the software and/or the drives themselves. USB stuff is kinda slow especially hooked to a router that is not primarily designed as a NAS. Look at the performance tables on this site where they test disk drives and SSD. Most are much higher than you see but many are still much slower than a gigabit cable.

Thank You.
I may have to borrow a managed switch and my friendly neighborhood IT man to determine if it is my setup or if I should be happy for more than 11-12 Mb/s.

 

[kanewolf]

You can test the network performance using iPerf --

 

[CurtisWalter]

Now, looking at Resource Monitor I was testing on a 1Gb file and I was able to see the throughput live and it was working up to 24Mb/sec and the file was transfered before it could ramp up more.
When I transferred a 35Gb m2ts movie file it went up to 65Mb/s from the NightHawk NAS back to my win 10 machine.

Thank you for the tip!

Edit: It actually says 376-416 Mbps Network I/O - Receive (46-65MB/sec) as I am watching it transfer.

 

[failboat]

Now, looking at Resource Monitor I was testing on a 1Gb file and I was able to see the throughput live and it was working up to 24Mb/sec and the file was transfered before it could ramp up more.
When I transferred a 35Gb m2ts movie file it went up to 65Mb/s from the NightHawk NAS back to my win 10 machine.

Thank you for the tip!

Edit: It actually says 376-416 Mbps Network I/O - Receive (46-65MB/sec) as I am watching it transfer.

If everything is wired it's likely disk speed.
wifi, powerline, mesh, etc can vary quite a bit, but ethernet is consistently 90% of 10/100/1000. Any bottleneck there would land right on one of those numbers.

One other less likely thing is if you are using rsync or scp or any ssh type of movement. it could be AES if the NAS is really weak. the latest version of ssh is very fast. it can hit 1Gbs no problems without hardware crypto. some arm based cpu are just really slow though.

 

[jsmithepa]

^What he says.

Mechanical drives speed is often the bottleneck. If u do a WINSAT for example to test your HD, u will find its maximum sequential read (rw head not jumping around) and random read (jumps around) has huge difference. The way files are stored, you have to assume it's stored in pieces and the HD's rw head routinely have to SEEK for the next piece, which lowers the transfer rate, no matter what ur ethernet can do.

If money no object, go for full solid state NAS and u can pump up your ethernet to 10 gigabit.

 

[CurtisWalter]

You can test the network performance using iPerf --

33yr shadetree IT, almost blind, LOL. 3 yrs formal training back when COBOL, FORTRAN, DOS3 and Pascal were hot. I downloaded iPerf and studied the command line parameters and couldn't quite figure out how to write the speed syntax for my small local network. I am not running a server here and resource monitor in Win10 did show the network speed of my main computer, 2012 I7 970 3.2GHz 6 cores + hyperthreading, 24Gb ram, HP Pavilion Elite HPE-480t maxed out, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6Gb, 3 ssd drives, blu-ray recorder, 3-25" Samsung TOC HD monitors etc.
I have an admin CMD open in win 10 64 and am playing with command line switches. Not much joy without much more research.
Could you help?

 

[kanewolf]

I have an admin CMD open in win 10 64 and am playing with command line switches. Not much joy without much more research.
Could you help?

Here is a tutorial webpage for using iPerf -- https://openmaniak.com/iperf.php You have to run it on two hosts one as a source and one as a sink.

 

[failboat]

33yr shadetree IT, almost blind, LOL. 3 yrs formal training back when COBOL, FORTRAN, DOS3 and Pascal were hot. I downloaded iPerf and studied the command line parameters and couldn't quite figure out how to write the speed syntax for my small local network. I am not running a server here and resource monitor in Win10 did show the network speed of my main computer, 2012 I7 970 3.2GHz 6 cores + hyperthreading, 24Gb ram, HP Pavilion Elite HPE-480t maxed out, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6Gb, 3 ssd drives, blu-ray recorder, 3-25" Samsung TOC HD monitors etc.
I have an admin CMD open in win 10 64 and am playing with command line switches. Not much joy without much more research.
Could you help?

iperf3 is easy to use. not sure about the first one. on windows you download it and then you can right click it and run powershell. in linux it's available in the repo. maybe global on ubuntu

iperf3 -s
iperf3 -c <server ip>