Command-line speed test?

[H.S.]

Chris Jones wrote:

> I doubt on any recent machine the CPU will saturate due to encryption 
> before the network bandwidth does (if it does, I doubt you have anything 
> to worry about bandwidth wise ;) )

Yup, I see what you mean, but "recent" can be pretty misleading. My post 
was based on our experience with my brother's computer connected on our 
LAN in our home. I run a Linux machine as a router (ppp0 to our LAN) and 
when I transfered a file to/from his computer via rsync or scp, I could 
get maybe around 7 MB/sec (Mega Bytes / sec) instead of around 11 MB/s 
(theoretical upper limit is 100 Mb/s or 12.5 MB/s). For the life of me, 
we couldn't find what was the bottleneck. I went each and every iptables 
to see what was causing the problem without much luck.

Then I had a reason to install dnsmasq on the router machine. That 
helped a bit and upped the speed to around 8 or 9 MB/s.

Then incidentally my brother replaced that computer a few months ago 
with a new machine. Now, we are getting the expected speed of around 
10.5~11.5 MB/s, via rsync or scp. This makes much much more sense.

The older machine was a 1.9 GHz Intel CPU with 512 MB of RAM. Not a 
machine which one would call a slow machine as far as scp or ssh is 
converned.


> Moreover, I
>> think one needs an account on the remote machine.
> 
> The OP seemed to suggest (to me at least) that he did.

Yeah, I must have missed that then.


> 
> Someone else suggested iftop. I hadn't heard of this before but seems 
> pretty useful.
> 

In that case, bmon and bwm are two additional examples to try.

Regards.