Can anyone recommend a good LAN Bandwidth measuring tool?

[BBCritical]

Im looking for a good (preferably free) tool that measures how fast data is being transferred across my network between 2 PCs. Any suggestions?

[millers_35]

I read some pretty good things about this one http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemeter/

Miller

[sainswor99]

I use NETCPS a lot (http://www.netchain.com/netcps/) to help look for bandwidth bottlenecks. Simple, but limited.

Stu

[GKusnick]

I use Ixia Qcheck.

[flavius]

Or Bandwith Pro.

[wvpolekat]

Are you looking for a quick way to take a look or are you looking for something that does logging and keeps historical data?

If you are looking for a quick method, open up Task Manger in XP and look at the network tab. Assuming that the network is 100mb, 1%=1mb. Quick and dirty way to take a look.

If you are looking for historical data, you can use perfmon that comes with XP (I know Pro for sure, assume Home as well)

If you want to get really fancy, you can enable SNMP on your machines and find an SNMP RMON tool to monitor the interface and give you performance data.

One of the inherent problems in much of this is that almost all of these methods will give you data on ALL the traffic on a given interface, and won't give you data on traffic to/from a SPECIFIC destination, nor will it give you much info on exactly WHAT that traffic is. Normally, a sniffer/protocol analyzer is used to determine things like this.

There is a tool called "ntop" (free- available at http://www.openxtra.co.uk/freestuff/ntop-xtra.phpv) that will give you a lot of data about the traffic on your network that it can see, including top talkers, protocols,etc. Actually, I think I will setup Ntop on my Sage box today to get some stats. I had forgotten about ntop.

Something to remember about tools like ntop is that they work by passively listening to the network, since most people have switches instead of hubs, it will only see traffic to/from the machine it is installed on.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

One of the inherent problems in much of this is that almost all of these methods will give you data on ALL the traffic on a given interface, and won't give you data on traffic to/from a SPECIFIC destination, nor will it give you much info on exactly WHAT that traffic is.

Qcheck (linked above) is specifically for measuring point-to-point throughput, not NIC utilization. The way I read BBCritical's question, throughput is what he's looking for.

[wvpolekat]

I saw "fast data is being transferred across my network between 2 PC" which to me means acutual/current usage, and not "how much data COULD be transferred across my network between 2 pcs"

Either way, both bases are covered between both our posts.