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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
Put a stash of porn at one end of your network and a slashdotter at the other. That should max out the link.
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
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
If you had included a link to one of your web sites with your submission, then you'd already be done.
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.