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I'm trying to measure the max bandwidth usage of my LAN with Wireshark. I´ve done several packet captures but I don't know how to obtain the max bandwidth usage. Any Idea?

Thank you in advance

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  • Check that: blog.davidvassallo.me/2010/03/22/…
    – Nakrule
    Jun 19, 2019 at 13:04
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    Use something like iperf to measure bandwidth.
    – Mike Pennington
    Jun 19, 2019 at 13:22
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    You want to drive a nail with a screwdriver. Use the correct tool for the job. Also, you really want the throughput, not the bandwidth. Bandwidth is a function of the physical interface (the bandwidth of 100 Mbps ethernet is 100 Mbps), while throughput is how much useful data you can send (something less than the 100 Mbps bandwidth of 100 Mbps ethernet).
    – Ron Maupin ♦
    Jun 19, 2019 at 14:49
  • Did any answer help you? If so, you should accept the answer so that the question doesn't keep popping up forever, looking for an answer. Alternatively, you can provide and accept your own answer.
    – Ron Maupin ♦
    Dec 15, 2019 at 4:25

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You could add the frame (or packet or payload) sizes for a given time period and calculate total size / time to get the average L2/L3/L4 throughput during that time. Wireshark doesn't do that.

To seriously get a measure of momentary throughput, switch functions like RMON (by interface only), sFlow or OpenFlow (possibly filtered by source, destination, L4 port number, VLAN, size, ...) are much better suited.

The maximum bandwidth of a path is a more theoretical figure you'd get by comparing all link bandwidths on that path, the lowest one being the limit of the overall bandwidth.

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Simple method is to use iperf, if you want to find the max bandwidth between two LAN endpoints.

You can also measure throughput of particular TCP session through wireshark. For that follow the following steps:

  1. Open Wireshark and start capturing the packet
  2. Start downloading/transferring file from the PC
  3. Once downloading/transferring is complete, stop the capture
  4. Apply filter (ip.addr eq --source ip-- and ip.addr eq --destination ip--).
  5. Right Click on any packet and select Follow---->TCP Stream from context menu
  6. Click on statistics menu and select TCP Stream Graphs--------->Throughput

A new window will appear displaying throughput graph of that particular TCP session.

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