TOPIC: Methods of measuring network throughput

What are some ways that I can measure the actual throughput between PCs/Servers/Switches...

I know that I can run speed tests to a web server like speakeasy.net... but what about internally between two switches or PCs?

You can test it by copying a certain file from the second PC/Server to the remote one and see the transfer rate
that will be in Windows explorer... also you can use FTP to see howmuch data transferd in howmnay seconds..

That's the way to do it. It won't show you the maximum throughput though because of the overhead of the OS and the chosen file copy mechanism will throttle the throughput somewhat. I've also found it's worth repeating the test say five times and taking the average as little bits of disk activity or other traffic on the network can easily skew a single result. The file size can also affect the result - I tried a huge file once and saw mega-throughput fr the first ten seconds or so until the cache memory in the disk controllers ran out, then it settled back to a slower rate. To see things like this, have task manager or perfmon showing the network performance on the machine while the test runs

Take a look at QCheck (Free)

www.ixchariot.com/products/datasheets/qcheck.html

I use IPerf its a nice program with a pretty little GUI.
It gives you the option of using UDP or TCP too.

sourceforge.net/projects/iperf

Thanks for the replies. I will look into the programs. I have heard of IPerf before, but have not really used it.