• Compatible with Mac 10.7.5 (Lion) or later; LAN Speed Test and LAN Speed Test (Lite) are now the same download; Packets up to 9 GB in size and up to 1000 packets. Chunk size adjustable up to 1 MB (for advanced testers) View results by Average, Maximum, and Minimum throughputs. Progress bar and cancel button allowing user to cancel at any time.
• TamoSoft Throughput Test. Free. Proprietary. Windows ▼ Networking 11 alternatives.

• Measure Internet Speed Windows 10
• Check Speed Network Mac

Updated: June 13, 2021 Home » Freeware and Software Reviews » Wireless WiFi Optimization & Network

LAN Speed Test (Lite) The Lite version of LAN Speed Test is a standalone portable executable of 122KB and basically an older free version of the shareware program. It’s an easy to use tool for measuring the speed on your LAN by copying a file to another computer that is located on the same local network.

How to test internal LAN network speed? In order to test and troubleshoot networks we need tools that allow us to generate network traffic and analyze the network’s throughput performance. This is true for both wired and wireless networks. In order to properly troubleshoot a wireless (or wired) network we need a way to benchmark its performance, so as modifications are made we can determine whether or not they really make a difference in the network’s performance.

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This is where these LAN benchmarking tools fit in to test network speed between two computers. The concept is you install a new wireless network and it works perfectly. Run these tools and record the benchmark results for later reference. Sometime in the future when either you or others suspect performance has declined then run these tools again and compare the latest results with those you gathered when the network was first installed and working perfectly.

↓ 01 – LAN Speed Test Lite | Windows | macOS

LAN Speed Test was designed from the ground up to be a simple but powerful tool for measuring file transfer, hard drive, USB Drive, and Local Area Network (LAN) speeds (wired & wireless). First, you pick a folder to test. This folder can be on a local drive or USB drive, etc. to test the drive speed, or a shared folder on your network to test your network speed.

Next, LAN Speed Test builds a file in memory, then transfers it both ways (without effects of Windows/Mac file caching) while keeping track of the time, and then does the calculations for you. For more advanced users, you can test to LAN Speed Test Server instead of a shared folder to take the slower hard drives out of the process as you are testing from one computer’s RAM to another computer’s RAM. Simple concept and easy to use. You’ll find that LAN Speed Test will quickly become one of your favorite network tools!

• Test the speed of your Local Network by testing to/from network shared folders
• Test the speed of your local drives (USB Drives, hard drives, etc.)
• Compatible with LST Server (v1.5 or later) for real network performance results without hard drive limitations – Even test your WAN (Internet) speed with LST Server
• Ability to choose Network Interface Card for computers with multiple NICs

↓ 02 – HELIOS LanTest | Windows | macOS

HELIOS LanTest is a very popular network performance and reliability testing solution for Mac and Windows clients. It is very easy to use within seconds and scales from single local disk testing, to testing performance of a network volume, as well as multi-user concurrent client testing against a single server volume.

HELIOS LanTest can be downloaded via HELIOS WebShare at Server: http://webshare.helios.de, Username and password are – tools

↓ 03 – TamoSoft Throughput Test | Windows | macOS

TamoSoft Throughput Test is a utility for testing the performance of a wireless or wired network. This utility continuously sends TCP and UDP data streams across your network and computes important metrics, such as upstream and downstream throughput values, packet loss, and round-trip time, and displays the results in both numeric and chart formats.

TamoSoft Throughput Test supports both IPv4 and IPv6 connections and allows the user to evaluate network performance depending on the Quality of Service (QoS) settings.

Microsoft Windows: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2. macOS: Yosemite (10.10), El Capitan (10.11), Sierra (10.12), High Sierra (10.13), Mojave (10.14). Android (client only): Android 4.1 and newer. iOS (client only): iOS 8.0 and newer.

↓ 04 – LANBench | Windows

LANBench is a simple LAN / TCP Network benchmark utility. It is designed for testing network performance between two computers and is based on Winsock 2.2. LANBench tests TCP performance only and is designed for minimal CPU usage so that the pure performance of your network could be fully tested.

• Multiple simultaneous connections – up to 20 (for load simulation)
• Low CPU overhead for pure network performance test
• Multithreaded utilizing Windows I/O completion port
• Configurable packet size, test duration and transfer mode

↓ 05 – NetIO-GUI | Windows

NetIO-GUI is a Windows frontend for the multi platform command line utility ‘netio’. It measures ICMP response times and network transfer rates for different packet sizes and protocols. All results are stored in a SQLite database file and can easily be compared. NetIO-GUI is preferred to rate the quality of peer-to-peer connections like VPN.

↓ 06 – NetStress | Windows

NetStress allows you to generate network traffic and analyze the network’s throughput performance. The results of that comparison with the previous benchmark will indicate whether or not there really is a problem and dictate which steps to take next (if any).

Regardless of your technical expertise or how expensive your diagnostic tools are, if you are modifying a wireless network or making decisions to modify it and you are not testing throughput then you risk wasting time and resources going down the wrong path.

• Single instance of the application (i.e. each instance can be used as server or server plus client)
• Supports both TCP and UDP data transfers
• Supports multiple data streams
• Variable TCP / UDP segment size
• Rate of packet transmission (Packets Per Second)
• Variable Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)
• Uplink and downlink modes
• Auto node discovery
• Choice of display units (KBps, Kbps, MBps, Mbps)
• Support for multiple network adapters

Measure Internet Speed Windows 10

↓ 07 – iperf | macOS | Linux

iperf is a tool for active measurements of the maximum achievable bandwidth on IP networks. It supports tuning of various parameters related to timing, protocols, and buffers. For each test it reports the bandwidth, loss, and other parameters. The current version, sometimes referred to as iperf3, is a redesign of an original version developed at NLANR/DAST.

iperf3 is a new implementation from scratch, with the goal of a smaller, simpler code base, and a library version of the functionality that can be used in other programs. iperf3 also has a number of features found in other tools such as nuttcp and netperf, but were missing from the original iperf. These include, for example, a zero-copy mode and optional JSON output. Note that iperf3 is not backwards compatible with the original iperf.

↓ 08 – PassMark Advanced Network Test | Free Trial | Windows

The network benchmark test will work with any type of TCP/IP connection. Including ethernet, dial up modems, ADSL, cable modems, local area networks (LAN), Wide area networks (WAN) and wireless networking (WiFi). The software has been optimized to use a minimum amount of CPU time, allowing even high speed gigabit ethernet connections to be benchmarked. Users have the ability to change the following test parameters.

• The IP address of the machine acting as the server and the port number used for the test to help with firewall issues.
• The size of the data block used for each send request. It is also possible to select variable sized blocks to measure performance deltas as block size increases or decreases.
• The duration of the test.
• The protocol, either TCP or UDP. The TCP protocol is when data integrity is important (Errors are corrected using data re-transmission). UDP is used with applications that are tolerant to data loss such as video streaming.

HELIOS LanTest is a very popular network performance and reliability testing solution for Mac and Windows clients. It is very easy to use within seconds and scales from single local disk testing, to testing performance of a network volume, as well as multi-user concurrent client testing against a single server volume.

This version has been designed using the latest native APIs for testing common file I/O operations, which are used when working with files on server volumes. Five different setups are available, to range from slower networks like standard Ethernet/DSL, up to 40 Gigabit Ethernet. Make sure to select the proper network environment for the existing connection between client and server:

Check Speed Network Mac

HELIOS LanTest displays the results on the screen (see figure above) and collects them in a logfile for later use, e.g. in a spreadsheet application. It also recognizes how many LanTest users are concurrently running performance tests, and therefore allows determining the server performance under multi-user load.

Today’s server storage access for clients can be very complex: it includes client network connection, file server caching, raid controller caching, various RAID configurations, connected disks (e.g. SAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI), and finally the physical disk seek and read operation. Therefore, HELIOS LanTest has a disk latency testing (called “Seek test”) functionality to present the end-to-end latency in milliseconds. It measures the random access time to a connected storage.

macOS note: supported file server protocols – AFP, NFS, SMB

All volume performance testing has been done against AFP volumes as AFP 3.x offers the best performance and is most compatible with Mac clients. At present, other Mac protocols, including NFS and SMB, only offer a fraction of the performance and have limited compatibility (no support for Aliases, Time Machine backups, Spotlight searches, server fast file find), as well as permission incompatibilities. Even so, HELIOS LanTest has also received limited testing using NFS and SMB.

Windows note: supported file server protocols – SMB

All performance testing has been done against SMB volumes.

Get HELIOS LanTest

HELIOS LanTest can be downloaded via HELIOS WebShare at:
Server: http://webshare.helios.de
User name: tools
Password: tools

Login, select the “HELIOS Tools” sharepoint and navigate to “HELIOS LanTest > for Mac OS X (10.6 and higher)” or “for Windows” and select Download from the “Transfer” menu.

Note for LanTest macOS beta versions: If an error message is issued when opening LanTest (“HELIOS LanTest can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.”) do the following:

• Right-click on the LanTest program icon and select Open.
• Confirm the next dialog with OK.

Setup for local disk testing

• In the LanTest “Test settings” section, choose your harddisk to be tested by clicking somewhere into the Volume: line. Alternatively, select File > Choose Test Volume... from the menu bar.
• Then select Enterprise networks, e.g. 10 Gigabit Ethernet from the Network: pop-up menu.
• Enter the desired number of test runs into the provided field.
  Note: The more test runs completed, the more precise the average result!
• Finally, click on Start. To cancel the test, click on Stop.

Typical HELIOS LanTest setup for “Fast Ethernet” connection

Setup for single-user network volume testing

Single-user network volume testing works as described in “Setup for local disk testing” above, with the difference that you need to specify the volume to be tested, and select an appropriate and reasonable network connection from the Network: pop-up menu which suits your network adapter and network connection. For example, it does not make sense to select a Gigabit Ethernet connection when you are connected via DSL, even though your network adapter might support higher transfer rates.

Setup for multi-user network volume testing

To test with multiple computers, save the selected settings to the test volume and start LanTest on the individual computers by double-clicking the settings file:

• Apply your LanTest settings and select File > Save LanTest Settings... from the menu bar.
• Select File > Open LanTest Settings..., or just double-click the stored settings file (“<name>.LanTestSettings”).

Background information on print testing

LanTest print testing submits a print job of the specified size as a PostScript job to the queue. The job itself contains an image of the selected job size. The print job will not print any pages in order to avoid wasting paper. macOS and Windows do not support direct printing and therefore always spools first to a temporary file, and then submits the print job to the printer or server print spooler. The advantage of the print test is that it allows measuring different printing protocols and connections all the way from the client to the spooler and/or printer. Only the local spooling time is taken into account. To see how long it takes to transfer the job to the printer or spooler watch your local print queue and the print server information, or just check how long the printer is busy with the job.

Note: Many print tests with large jobs can fill the system disk and the server spooling area. Therefore the print test comes unselected by default.

The LanTest results logfile

The log file “<LanTest-version-ClientIP-ClientName>.log” is tab-separated to allow importing the data into a spreadsheet application for further calculations, and compiling a report by combining multiple tests from different clients.

License information

HELIOS LanTest is available free of charge and may be used within your company for evaluation and test purposes, to be used on network clients for testing, as long as the copyright notice and the program itself are left intact. Re-distribution of HELIOS LanTest is not permitted. Please refer to this web page for downloads. Publishing HELIOS LanTest results must include the used version and a link to the HELIOS LanTest web page. Magazines and other parties which would like to redistribute HELIOS LanTest are welcome to contact HELIOS Software.

HELIOS LanTest is copyright 1989-2020 by HELIOS Software GmbH, Hannover, Germany.

Privacy policy

During startup, HELIOS LanTest contacts the HELIOS web site at maximum once a day, to check if a newer version is available. For this, the LanTest version, OS version, language and the test selection will be submitted to HELIOS.

References

HELIOS Tech Info #157
HELIOS Xtar