December 13th, 2009 Category: General 
A simple and free tool for private usage is available from simplie Software. It lets you run short and long benchmarks of your hard discs and compare the result with other hard discs from a database.
For me it is a sufficient tool as I wanted to compare the overall performance of two different hard discs.
There is also a online shop to buy the software for commercial use.
Links
Written on December 13, 2009 | Posted in
General 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
Written on January 10, 2009 | Posted in
Linux Server 