General Information on Guestimate Maximum Network Throughput

General Information on Guestimate Maximum Network Throughput

This document provides general information about maximum network throughput. This information applies to most any system, regardless of operating system and levels.


Throughput over a network can usually be expected to reach saturation at around 80 percent of its rated capacity. This leads to the following maximum throughputs that can be obtained for given networks:

          4 Mb Token ring - 0.4 MB/sec 
          10 Mb Ethernet - 1.0 MB/sec 
          16 Mb Token ring - 1.6 MB/sec 
          25 Mb ATM - 2.5 MB/sec 
          100 Mb Ethernet - 10.0 MB/sec 
          100 Mb FDDI - 10.0 MB/sec 
          155 Mb ATM - 15.5 MB/sec 
          Gb Ethernet = 100 MB/sec 

The numbers provided do not reflect other traffic over shared lines, broadcast traffic, traffic from other applications, routing delays, switching delays, half-duplex settings or any of the many other factors which can decrease the throughput of a network.

These numbers do not factor in disk read times, tape write times, application overhead, system load, operating system overhead, or any other non-network factor. The information in this document is not intended to be a guarantee of performance, nor is it intended to replace actual testing in your environment.


[ Doc Ref: 98406464218830     Publish Date: Apr. 05, 2001     4FAX Ref: 1041 ]