If you're turning up a 10 GigE circuit, as a customer I would be asking for that circuit to be tested with some modern tools such as the JDSU T-BERD. For the price you're probably paying, it's probably not unreasonable to have it as part of the turn-up fee. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Robert M. Enger [mailto:enger@enger.us] Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:23 PM To: ernst@easystreet.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Gigabit speed test anybody? I turned-up a pair of 10GigE circuits a while back (with a different, unnamed carrier). They didn't perform too well. When I pushed them for assistance with testing, they revealed that they had multiple IPERF transponders scattered throughout their network. They were not open to the public, but could be made available for short periods of time (timer-based, requiring repeated re-authorization to use them for an extended period). It seems likely that Level3 has similar (or superior) testing facilities. A call to some account executives may be required to open the kimono. Separately, the Super computer centers used to have speed-test servers installed adjacent to their border routers. They were dedicated, tuned hosts specifically for speed testing. One/more of them might be willing to help you out. However, unless one of them happens to use Level3 for commercial transit, your performance will be gated by the excess intervening network(s) and under all circumstances, by the competing traffic on their access circuit. Finally, I echo the sentiments about avoiding disk I/O. If you do use FTP download for testing, you may wish to write the local output to the null device. Some ftp clients allow the null device to be specified as the local output file when downloading files. On XP command-line FTP, the device "Nul:" is accepted. On Un*x it is /dev/null. The command-line client on Server 2003 et al does not seem to accept Nul as the local destination file when downloading. (anyone know the correct magic?) Remember to download multiple times; assuming the source server has enough ram, it will cache the file in memory during the first download and successive downloads in rapid succession should be essentially memory-to-memory (if you're using a null device on the receiving end) Bob Rick Ernst wrote:
Resent from my subscribed address. Hopefully this isn't a dupe to anybody. ---------------------------------------
I'm working on turning up our first GigE connection (400mbs CIR) and the various online speedtests I'm aware of choke after about 100Mbs or so.
Does anybody know of testing sites that can handle higher bandwidth, or have an ftp host or similar to test against?
I'm connected to Level3, backhauled to Seattle, WA.
Thanks, Rick