TCP Slow Start, Congestion Avoidance & Determining Bandwidth

Question

Is there a formula someplace which can be used to determine the minimum number of segments / bytes which need to be transfered across a TCP connection to determine it's bandwidth and which takes into account Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance? I'm aware of the pathrate tool, but I want if possible something a bit simpler that I can incorporate in an app to get a descent ballpark figure. One example of usage would be downloading some data from a webserver in order to determine the optimum number of threads for downloading a bunch of small files automatically. This is related to a previous question I posted: TCP, HTTP and the Multi-Threading Sweet Spot

Answer 1

I do not think that there is a fixed number of bytes required to be sent to determine the bandwidth. This number can depend on network type and speed.

Bandwidth is a measure of some resource transferred over a time interval. To get real data you need to measure it. Here are some hints how to do that