Network Throughput Measurement
January 10th, 2009 Category: Linux ServerA real nice and easy to use tool for measuring the network throughput on Linux/Unix as well as Windows is NETIO. You only need to download the binaries from the NETIO homepage, store on your server or clients and execute them.
The example below shows a sample measurement between to servers connected with a 100 MBit ethernet card and located at two different providers.
On one machine NETIO is started as server:
machine1:~/netio/bin# ./linux-i386 -s NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26 (C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel TCP server listening. UDP server listening. TCP connection established ... Receiving from client, packet size 1k ... Sending to client, packet size 1k ... Receiving from client, packet size 2k ... Sending to client, packet size 2k ... Receiving from client, packet size 4k ... Sending to client, packet size 4k ... Receiving from client, packet size 8k ... Sending to client, packet size 8k ... Receiving from client, packet size 16k ... Sending to client, packet size 16k ... Receiving from client, packet size 32k ... Sending to client, packet size 32k ... Done. TCP server listening.
On the other machine NETIO is called e.g. with -t option for TCP and the name or IP of the other machine:
machine2:~/netio/bin# ./linux-i386 -t machine1.mydomain.de NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26 (C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel TCP connection established. Packet size 1k bytes: 7309 KByte/s Tx, 7645 KByte/s Rx. Packet size 2k bytes: 7276 KByte/s Tx, 7724 KByte/s Rx. Packet size 4k bytes: 7291 KByte/s Tx, 7737 KByte/s Rx. Packet size 8k bytes: 7276 KByte/s Tx, 7723 KByte/s Rx. Packet size 16k bytes: 7286 KByte/s Tx, 7719 KByte/s Rx. Packet size 32k bytes: 7291 KByte/s Tx, 7725 KByte/s Rx. Done.
We take a rough average of the result can multiply it by 8: 7,5 * 8 = 60 MBit/s. This is a acceptable value for a connection between two servers located at different providers within Germany.
For sure a useful tool! Also check Network Bandwidth Performance Measurement with Iperf
[...] result is slightly higher compared to the result from our measurement with netio. So we start the test again with addtional [...]