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High-Capacity Bandwidth Testing Software?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work for an ISP which specializes in high bandwidth (100+ megabit) fiber-based delivery solutions. As with any other ISP we sometimes have to perform troubleshooting with customers who are reporting slow throughput. We currently have a home-grown bandwidth testing server in order to point-to-point test the throughput across our own network. Unfortunately (fortunately), customers have begun purchasing amounts of bandwidth that are capable of exceeding our testing capacity. Given a multi-gigabit network infrastructure and an on-net server with a gigabit Ethernet port, what software packages are available which can reliably test throughput approaching one gigabit? Cross-browser compatibility and 'click-here-to-test' usability should be considerations."
Given a multi-gigabit network infrastructure and an on-net server with a gigabit Ethernet port, what software packages are available which can reliably test throughput approaching one gigabit?
You need a fast computer with a large hard-disk and a gigabit ethernet card, tcpdump, a shell, and 12000 monkeys to read the logs.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
But I'd start with something like pchar, which will tell you the effective bandwidth at each hop on the network. That will tell you how severe the blockage is and, more importantly, where. It's not the "best" tool out there, but it's reasonably non-intrusive (unlike most stress-testing tools) and I've not seen any obvious problems with it at gig speeds. It does need patching for Linux, though. I sent a patch to the maintainer who has sworn he'll someday get around to including it. NetBSD has a faster network stack, though, and is more suitable for such tests. Which I hate, as I prefer Linux, but facts don't change themselves to suit a like.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Put a stash of porn at one end of your network and a slashdotter at the other. That should max out the link.
The End to End Performance Initiative has a knoppix live CD image you can download that includes test tools that may help. I'm in the process of deploying these tools around my network now.
o lkit.html is the URL.
I've not tried to push a full gig with them (yet), but they seem to work better than anything else I've found so far...
http://e2epi.internet2.edu/network-performance-to
Sig??? I don't need no stinkin Sig!
TPTest http://sourceforge.net/projects/tptest/, an open source test suite from "Post och Telestyrelsen" http://www.pts.se/, a division of the Swedish goverment. Even a 200 MHz Pentium MMX running Linux could test a 100MBit/s fiber reliably.
http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/Iperf/
Very configurable, and if u want GUI or network tuning.. read the FAQ, they give suggestions.
-- Robi
The swedish consumer agency has coded a test for bandwidth testing. It works as far as I know up with 1GB connection, but could probably work with much higher speeds. The project is open source.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tptest/
It's a great tool that many of the ISP's in Sweden asks there customers to use before reporting in bad *DSL bandwidth.
If you're serious about it, you basically need to give in and spend serious $.
The main game in town is Spirent.
In the IPS & firewall testing world, they're what everyone uses, but even in lots of load balancing applications etc they're what people use.
There are a few software solutions around that do an ok job, but very few that can do much at decent speed (ie > 400Mbit). I have a pretty crack team of devs, and using hand tuned open source, and home-spun apps, we got by for a few years, but should have given in years earlier and just got a set of Spirent gear. You'll save time.
Their Smartbits line are basically hardware based packet generators, able to blast away for a variety of scenarios.
Their Avalanche line are hardware based full session generators, so you can re-create a web server being hammered by thousands of clients. I just signed a cheque for > $100k for a single pair of avalanche boxes however, so bring your cash box...
You'll probably find Spirent's hw based solutions frustrating, but if you work with others doing similar work they're very widely used, and you can exchange scripts etc..
There is an Irish company that was moving in to this space, and had an ok product, but it was a bit immature when I last tried it. Sorry, but their name escapes me- google should know.
--Q
BreakingPoint Systems makes network test hardware that can go way beyond 1 Gbps simulations. You can also capture and recreate traffic at high speeds to better simulate a specific users load.
If you had included a link to one of your web sites with your submission, then you'd already be done.
(Found somewhere on bash.org) :).
Oy! Maybe my job does rock.
Da Fluke network tester (a $6000 Gameboy wannabe) was broken today since someone took the lithium batteries out of it and neglected to put them back in the case.
We had to test out the connection between floors 2&4, going through floor 3 in the process.
so I tell da b0ss that the Network tester is dead... And I need to generate network traffic so I can see the stats on the switches and routers, make sure no packets are being killed prematurely.
So he sayz "How much is that tester worth?", I say "6K". He says "Great!".
he picks up his office phone, hits the global annoucement button, and says "Floors Two, Three, and Four, our IT Admin requires that you generate network traffic for equipment testing. Grab Half Life off my network share, I'll host". He hangs up and says "Happy?", I say "that works".
The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to a rather large Half Life MP game on Crossfire
For testing bandwidth I use Netperf. It's free, extremely customizable in the type of data sent (TCP/UDP streams, packet size, IPv4/IPv6, etc), and quite accurate. The program has no trouble generating enough traffic for a 1Gb link, and it's worked well over 10Gb links too. There's no GUI to it, but setting up a script to start it and report the results is pretty trivial.