Throughput Testers
Users of a network often complain about the speed of the network. Network “speed” is in some ways a personal perception because some people have more patience than others. To determine when a network slowdown is real as opposed to perceived, you need to actually measure the throughput. That’s what throughput testers are used for.
These devices, typically software based, work much like a protocol analyzer in that they measure the traffic seen on the network and can also classify the types of traffic that are eating up your bandwidth (which is probably what you really need to know). Figure 17.2 shows one version of this software by TamoSoft.
Figure 17.2 Throughput
This software is installed on a server and also on a client. In the figure, the software is measuring traffic between the client and a server. It shows the throughput for traffic in real time and in this shot is breaking that traffic up by unicast (TCP) and broadcast (UDP) types and...
