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"Does anyone have suggestions for some free or cheap software tools/utilities for testing throughput and bandwidth from the desktop to the server in a LAN?"
-MAESTROG
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Toast.Net Configuration - Test Workloads
Text File Download
The text file test is meant to simulate downloads of HTML pages to a Web browser. The test utilizes a single file of size 340,646 bytes.
In the initial trial, the file download completed in 62.25 seconds, yielding an average connection speed of 44 Kbps. Five additional trials were run, with 30-second waits between each, with the results shown below.
Toast.Net Text Download Performance
| Trial | Time (seconds) | Speed |
| 1 | 62.25 | 44 Kbps |
| 2 | 73.586 | 37 Kbps |
| 3 | 72.965 | 37 Kbps |
| 4 | 70.892 | 38 Kbps |
| 5 | 62.791 | 43 Kbps |
| 6 | 67.567 | 40 Kbps |
To aid in interpreting the results, Toast.net provides a chart that compares the performance acheived in the trial against typical results.
Toast.Net Expected Performance
Test Analysis
Toast.net claims that modems with an optimal 56K connection can achieve speeds of 70-90 Kbps in this benchmark. These results are possible with compression features in the modem protocol. Compression works especially well for text files like HTML pages, and it is not unusual to see a doubling of effective speed due to compression alone.
The V.90 modem used in this test connected to Earthlink at 21.6 Kbps. The results from Toast.net accurately point out that connection speed alone does not tell the whole performance story. Not only can much better performance be attained, but the actual speed a person sees on the Internet can vary significantly (up to 20% in these trials) from one minute to the next, even at a relatively low-traffic time of day.
Internet users typically download multiple small HTML pages rather than a single large file as done in the Toast.net benchmark. Multiple small downloads generally result in lower aggregate data rates, as the connection management overhead (messages to establish and teardown connections) take bandwidth away from the actual data transfer. For this reason, this Toast.net benchmark will likely report higher speeds than Internet users will see in practice.
Next page > Toast.net: Results with Graphics > Page
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the Computer Networking Forum. Consider writing your comments and questions there.
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