I am not getting 10Gbps … why?

Why am I not getting 10Gbps on my server?

There are a few basic things to consider before going any further, such as:

  1. If you are running a simple speed test from a site like speedtest.net, you need to remember that speedtest.net was developed for testing home DSL connections. Many of the servers you connect to within speedtest.net may not themselves be able to accommodate a full 10Gbps.
  2. How are you testing it? It is unlikely that many servers, even those very close together with 10Gbps ports, will be able to do a full 10Gbps on a single-threaded download or upload due to software overheads. A basic web browser download or wget might not yield full speeds.
  3. How far away are the source and destination servers? If your server is in London, run the test with another server in London, the latency and number of hops the connection has to go over can and will impact the connection speed, you will never get 10Gbps between London and Los Angeles, for example, as the geographical distance is just too great and every hop (network traffic exchange) you travel through in between will add latency and give you a speed hit

So how do I do a more accurate test?

Linux – use iperf3 it is available using most major package managers such as apt, yum or pacman.

Visit our speed test page here: https://as62240.net/speedtest select the same location as your server and run one of the provided iperf tests, the ports at the end are a choice to not paste as is, an example London test would be:

iperf3 -c lon.speedtest.clouvider.net -p 5205

Windows – use the iperf3 package from here: https://iperf.fr/iperf-download.php the windows 10 binaries should work fine on server 2016 or 2019, make sure to get the latest version.

Right-click on the start menu and open Windows PowerShell (admin) after extracting the binary, assuming it is the administrator downloads and version 3.13 run:

cd C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\iperf-3.1.3-win64\iperf-3.1.3-win64
.\iperf3.exe -c lon.speedtest.clouvider.net -p 5205

This again is a test to London. Make sure to pick the correct location.

This should give you a good idea of the actual connection speed, obviously, our test servers are just that ‘test servers’ so there may be some congestion, if you do not get the speed you expect the first time, give it a few attempts at least.

As with everything on the internet, latency/geographical distance does matter; it is unlikely you will ever achieve a full 10gbit speed to all locations. Even under ideal conditions, the distance and number of hops the traffic needs to pass through can vary greatly.

If you see speeds significantly less than 10Gbps, please open a ticket with all of the test information, and we will be happy to investigate. However, we will not accept tests run to 3rd party servers, and we have no end-to-end oversight or access to the source and destination networks and have no way of accurately troubleshooting.