Ethernet Port Connection Speed Test

[Saltydog182]

I'm an LV newbie and want to verify that the connection speed between a PC running LV and a listening system is 100Mbps. Can this be done with LV or do I need an Ethernet test (e.g., BERT or similar)  to do this. Pinging the other port can't tell me the connection speed to my (little) knowledge.

[DollaBrillz]

Ethernet Speed isn't deterministic, so testing the speed once would not guarantee that the speed is the same during every transfer. 

Can you tell me a bit more about your application? What is the listening system you are refferring to and what constraints are you under?

[Saltydog182]

The unit-under-test is an embedded system with an Ethernet port that I am to verify is communicating with my test fixture at 100Mbps. I had intended to add an additional NIC to the host PC specifically for this test as the host pc's motherboard NIC is in use with a company network for uploading test data. I had thought it might be as simple as connecting the host's NIC to the UUT Ethernet port, but then figured that I'd have to establish the connection through software and send it some number of packets to satisfy this requirement. At this point I don't know how the UUT's Ethernet port handles a new connection. I probably need to ask more questions of the UUT.

[Hooovahh]

Not sure if this is useful or not but you can open the Task Manager and look at the bus utilization on the network devices and their theoretical maximum speed.

[Dennis_Knutson]

For accurate and repeatable performance testing, you should use hardware such as available from Spirent. There are other others but that is what I used for validating throughput of hubs and routers.

[nathand · Accepted solution]

Do you need to verify the actual throughput, or you just need to verify that it negotiated a 100mbit link? If the latter, and if the UUT is connected directly to an ethernet port in your PC (no routers/switches/etc in the middle), there are ways to do that easily by querying the operating system about the network link. For example, you could use System Exec to run the command shown here: http://superuser.com/questions/412952/how-to-detect-the-speed-fast-or-gigabit-ethernet-of-a-network-... and parse the output. There's probably also a way to get this information through .NET properties.

[Saltydog182]

Yes, this does identify each NIC's speed, but I need a programmatic way of querying, but thanks! 

[Saltydog182]

This does the trick! I just need to massage it a bit to programmatically glean the port's identifier and speed -- maybe redirecting output to a file and then parsing. Thanks!

[nathand]

That is a programmatic way of querying it. Use LabVIEW's System Exec function to run the command, then parse the output string to get the connection speed. Or, you could duplicate this code in LabVIEW: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13134472/programatically-detect-connected-network-speed-on-window...

EDIT: sorry, looks like you were actually replying to a different post, wasn't clear that it wasn't in response to mine