What IS normal traffic speed?

[NSAI]

I have a multi-subnetted network spanning physical floors. My main switch is a Cisco 4006 on the main floor. I have this linked to (2) 3548's on another floor (at the moment via 100mbps w/ gigabit coming later this year) The users are all connected directly to their switchs based on floors. I have multiple VLANS running. Also have a BOVPN but that is not at issue.... for now! Almost all of the wiring is Cat5E (a few stray Cat5's still are running). I for the most part have everything set to hard set on the 4006 to auto/full. I have been using SolarWinds product to monitor the bandwidth usage. What I am seeing alarms me. I don't see us even scratching the surface of full utilization of the network speed. Doing some basic copying for server to client and back testing, I have been able to crack the 10mbps barrier barely (14mbps is the top speed I have achieved) No, i don't see an FCS errors that suggest mismatch speeds or duplexing.

These are my questions:
1. What type of speeds should I be seeing?
2. What is "typical" bandwidth speed on a 100mbps network?

Thanks for any and all suggestions and comments,
Stephen

 

[jimbopalmer]

Devil's advocate mode on:

When you say the switches are hard set to auto/full, you DO realize that each computer will have to be hard set as well, if you hard set the switches? You cannot auto negoitate with a device that is hard set.

Do you have real servers or just some variety of Windows?
Do the 'servers' have server grade ethernet cards or just some card that was cheap?

If the server is 'Buff' how many clients can hit it at once? They won't have server grade cards.

Devil's advocate mode Off:

Hope that helps! I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[jimbopalmer]

Ok let me bug you again (it is in your best interest, honest)

Years ago I played Rummy with my sister (and winning quite a lot of games)for about 6 months when she accused me of cheating. Turns out I was playing 500 Rummy and had not noticed she was playing Gin Rummy. The thing is, nothing about playing Gin Rummy is a 'protocol violation' in 500 Rummy. (Ill advised at times but not illegal) Only the player who is playing Gin Rummy can detect the 'protocol violation'.

If your switches expect traffic to be full duplex, they will never detect that the client is half duplex, they have to assume the client may just never had anything to say while recieving. Only on the client end will any errors occur, and the client software usually has little ability to warn you of errors.

Hope this helps! I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.