is my system network bound
 

How do I tell if a Linux system with a 2.6 kernel is network bound ?

Say I have a 10 Mbit/s NIC, and there is a lot of network activity that is making the system network bound, how can I determine this ?

What tools will allow me to ascertain if this is the case.

Is there a tool to say that data transfer is at 9 Mbit/s.

Is this the real meaning of a system being network bound ? Where is the threshold point, to make a system network bound ?

Afaik I don't think that full duplex(transmit and receive at the same time) or half duplex(transmit, and then receive) makes any difference.

Would be grateful for some tips and pointers, as i've wondered about this for a while.

Thanks

I'm really not sure what you are actually referring to here. If you are trying to find out if you have any activity over your network interfaces, then ifconfig can tell you that.

If you want a real-time display, then you might want to look at tools like IPTraf.

If a system is slow, then it is usually because it is

CPU bound or
IO bound (Disk, Network)

How do I monitor the amount of network traffic to confirm that a system is network bound, which will probably be confined to the speed of the pipe and not the NIC :-)

Does IPTraf do that ?