Clarification needed

[xsys2001i]

Hi - just purchase the LAN Speed Test (LST) utility and ran it bewteen a laptop and a server. I'd been using Ntttcp which is a command-line utility, so I ran both to see how close the results were with each other.

But the LST utility shows 322 Mbps (write) and 413 Mbps (read), and the NTTTCP shows a total throughput of 946 Mbps. I may be missing something, so thought I'd ask, but how do you reconcile the differences? even with both Read and Write in agregate, the total is 735 Mbps.




Thanks,

Sean

[Pete Totushek]

Hi Sean,

The difference is because it sounds like you are testing to a shared folder on your server and not with LST Server running on your server. You are being limited by your hard drive speeds (which is your real world file transfer speed through the network). When testing with LST Server (as in Ntttcp) you are testing from client to server's RAM which is much faster and will give you a true network speed test.

-Pete

[xsys2001i]

Pete,

Thanks - that makes total sense. But a quick follow-up question. When using a network share for testing, does that also take into account the disk sub-system on the client-side? or does it not make a difference for the purposes of testing? The way I see this in my mind is that the client-side is running from memory (RAM) and the server side is writing/reading from disk. If both sides were accessing disk, would the results be different?


Thanks,

Sean

Hi Sean,

The difference is because it sounds like you are testing to a shared folder on your server and not with LST Server running on your server. You are being limited by your hard drive speeds (which is your real world file transfer speed through the network). When testing with LST Server (as in Ntttcp) you are testing from client to server's RAM which is much faster and will give you a true network speed test.

-Pete

[Pete Totushek]

Hi Sean,

You're right. The client builds the file in RAM and sends it to the shared folder in this case. It doesn't start the timer until the file/packet is built and ready to be delivered. If the Client built the file on the hard drive and sent it from there, the results would likely be different. It would depend upon if the client's hard drive was slower than the shared folder's hard drive, etc. The purpose of LAN Speed Test is to give the most accurate results of your network and server's performance. You can also use LAN Speed Test to test your client's drive speed by testing to your C: drive or testing your USB Drive's speed, etc.

-Pete