Testing Linux to Linux Server File Transfer Speed

Testing Linux to Linux Server File Transfer Speed

If the port where you plug your Ethernet cable in is capable of transmitting 1 Gigabit worth of information per second, since there are 8 bits in a byte, this translates to 125 MB/sec. To see what you are really getting in file transfer speed between two servers, do the following: 

1.  Make a local directory to which you will mount:

mkdir /mnt/m1

2.  Get a mount from the Reload server to the live server and the post office path:

Example:   mount -t nfs  192.168.100.3:/gw/po /mnt/m1

3.  From the Reload server, create a 1GB file on the post office server, on the same volume where the post office is:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000  of=/mnt/m1/f1.txt

4.  Now copy the file from the mount point on the post office server to the "tmp" directory on the Reload server. Use the "scp" command so that you get better diagnostic information. So basically you are scp'ing right into the same server you are on, but you are doing it so that you can get good diagnostic information. For example:

scp -rv /mnt/m1/f1.txt root@reload2:/tmp/f2.txt

Below is a graphic that showed the output of the scp command:

This article was originally published in the GWAVA knowledgebase as article ID 2212