Hi folks.
We (at UCI) have a gigabit network we need to troubleshoot. It seems to be underperforming quite a lot - like it's performing about 1/10th of what it should.
Some of the routers and switches aren't under our control. We have some SNMP data getting graphed for our router, but getting that same data for the other equipment could (or maybe not!) hit bureaucracy.
Which leads me to ask - is there such a thing as a network benchmark that doesn't require the usual client-server architecture, like maybe one that's based on ICMP rather than TCP or UDP?
If there is such a thing, and it gives results that are somehow related to what we might expect from TCP and/or UDP, then we might be able to run it against each router hop, to see at what point things are slowing down, without having to have router access.
PS: I've already tried pchar, clink, pathchar and pipechar. On this network, pipechar seems to come the closest to giving a useful result, but I'm not sure I trust it, since the numbers it gives vary so much from run to run, and because it isn't showing a drop off point - it thinks the network is much faster than it is, even faster than what iperf thinks.
Thanks!