[c-nsp] IP SLAs - throughput measurement

[Adam Greene]

Hi,

We're trying to find a good way to measure throughput on a gigabit link between two 3560G's. 

I've been playing with the IP SLAs features, and it does provide me with RTT, but as far as I can tell, the data isn't granular enough to provide me with what I need: the minimum RTT it reports is 1ms, and the max payload is 1500 bytes. If I'm understanding correctly, that will enable me to report throughput up to 2.4 Mbps:

(1500bytes) * (8bits/byte) / (0.50ms one-way time) = 2.4Mbps

I suppose I could run about 417 simultaneous jitter operations and see if I get a 1ms RTT on all of them, but that seems a little far-fetched. 

I wonder if there is any other way. 

I could connect gigabit PC's to both switches and run something like iPerf (which does report delay in increments of µs and smaller), but so far my duo-core 2.8GHz / 1GB RAM PC's have only been able to push 440Mbps max even when directly connected to one another via cat5e.

That's why I was hoping I could test something directly from switch to switch.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Adam