I have a gigabit network set up in my house and a few Ubuntu based boxes. Out of complete curiosity I would like to check the speed between the two boxes. I am not having any problems with speed or anything, it really is just the geek in me that is curious. Plus maybe the results will let me know if there is room for improvement, or that I have something configured wrongly.
So how do you properly test the network speed between Ubuntu boxes?
Whenever I am downloading packages using Ubuntu Software Center (or any package manager for that matter), my Internet connection slows to an absolute crawl. In fact, most requests timeout.
Is there a way to limit the bandwidth that Software Center uses when downloading packages?
I think I'm being the victim of a bug here. Sometimes while I'm working (I still don't know why), my network traffic goes up to 200 KB/s and stays that way, even tough I'm not doing anything internet-related.
This sometimes happens to me with the CPU usage. When it does, I just run a top command to find out which process is responsible and then kill it. Problem is: I have no way of knowing which process is responsible for my high network usage. Both the resource monitor and the top command only tell me my total network usage, neither of them tells me process specific network info.
I've found questions here about monitoring total bandwidth usage, but, as I mentioned, that's not what I need. Is there another command I can use to find out which process is getting out of hand?
The command iftop gives results that disagree entirely with the information reported by System Monitor. While the latter claims there's high network traffic, the former claims there's barely 1 KB/s.
I've already tried killing all the obvious ones (Firefox, update-manager, Pidgin, etc) with no luck. So far, restarting the machine is the only way I found of getting rid of the issue.
Some broadband providers impose a monthly download limit, charging extra if you go over. It is also quite easy to exceed some of the lower limits just by installing/updating packages and 'normal' browsing (which to me includes streaming TV programs and movies).
This means that you need to limit the amount you use the internet, yet it is hard to know when.
The System Monitor helps a bit with this by giving a total received/total sent in the networking section of the Resources tab. However, this is reset every reboot. It would be good if there was a way to have a monthly total received so you can know how close you are to exceeding your limit and maybe even be given warnings if it looks like you are going to exceed the limits.
Does anyone know of a way to achieve this?
How I can limit Download/Upload bandwidth for: