Gigabit Network - Test

Solution 1:

GigaBIT Ethernet is 1 billion BITS per second. Theoretical maximum transfer is 125MB/sec.

Having said that, your 35MB/sec is a bit slow, but encryption is going to slow down SCP file transfers and that probably accounts for it.

Encryption aside, any file transfer is a poor network benchmark as your I/O subsystem may be bottlenecking the transfer, though. You mention ifconfig, so I assume you're running some *nix OS. Have a look at the ttcp utility. It gives a nice measure of TCP throughput on your network.

Solution 2:

Gigabit is not Gigabyte. The best case transfer speed is 125MB/s (1000 gigabits / 8).

SCP is a poor tool to measure bandwidth. You have the overhead of the encryption, you may have compression enabled, and you will have to take into account the speed of the drives on both the source and destination.

Iperf is a much better tool to measure bandwidth.

If you want to see your link speed use ethool {interface} or mii-diag {interface} if you are using Linux.

Is it possible to use ping to measure network speed?

The bandwidth measurement you got with ping would most likely be even less accurate then a TCP or UDP based test like ttcp or iperf use. If you really wanted to try it you would need to start a capture in something like wireshark/tcpdump and do a flood ping ping -f against another host, then you analyse the capture and see how much ICMP traffic was passed during a time period. The problem is that several devices de-prioritize ICMP.