On Dec 4, 2010, at 9:10 AM, John Robinson wrote: > HOW do you test to see what is coming out the pipe at the computer? Is there > a program that will tell you the speed coming through the cable? I would > like to try this with both the 5e and the 6 to see if there is a difference.
There are several ways: Run Activity Monitor and click on the network tab. It has a nice graphical display of input and output. I've not found it to be the most accurate, perhaps because it does some sort of averaging that I don’t understand. iStat Pro is a free Dashboard widget that I like for this kind of stuff. If you're not allergic to the command line, the most accurate way to get the I/O speed is with the sar utility. You could use "sar -n DEV 1 10" to get a rolling picture with an average listed at the end. The devices you want in the list are en0 or en1, depending on how your system is set up. The sar utility can do a lot of other stuff related to counting bad packets and such, so you might want to read "man sar" to see the other command options. When I switched my home switch over to a GB model, I went around and tested all the wired ports in the house. Some are Cat 5e and others are Cat 6. The way I did it was to put a big dummy file on my Linux server and ftp it to my laptop at each of the ports in the different rooms. Because I knew the file size, I timed the network speed with a stopwatch. You can create a big dummy file from the command line with dd if=/dev/zero of=dummyfile bs=1m count=100 The "count" option lists the number of megabytes in the file, and you can change it to anything you want. As I wrote it, the command creates a file filled with the byte 0 repeated 100 million times. The "of" option is the name of the output file and can be changed to anything you want. (Don't put any spaces, :, or / in the name.) It might take a while to run, depending on your hard drive speed. I found there was no difference between 5e and 6 over the short runs I have. I did have to replace one wall outlet because there were many dropped packets through it.
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