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shaiss
Asked: 2010-02-12 17:33:31 +0800 CST

Network Stress Test Tool

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I need a tool to stress test our network in between two machines.

The app should send out a packet to machine 2, machine 2 should send it back, machine 1 verifys the packet is correct, generates a new packet and the process starts all over.

Anyone know of such an app?

networking stress network-traffic

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You want iperf. It's super tiny, cross platform, and dead simple to use.

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  2. If you are talking about 2 Windows boxes, I like NTTTCP:

    http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/TCP_tool.mspx

    NTttcp is a multithreaded, asynchronous application that sends and receives data between two or more endpoints and reports the network performance for the duration of the transfer. It is essentially a Winsock-based port of the ttcp tool that measures networking performance in terms of bytes transferred per second and CPU cycles per byte. Because it can be difficult to diagnose a system's overall performance without dividing the system into smaller subsystems, NTttcp allows users to narrow the focus of their testing and investigation to just the networking subsystem.

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  3. It depends on what protocol you want to "stress test".

    Ping (as already mentioned) for ICMP, but this is primarily for establishing that you have some sort of connectivity.

    To load a network and see how fast it will go, TTCP (PCATTCP if on windows: http://www.pcausa.com/Utilities/ttcpdown1.htm) as long as your protocol is TCP/IP.

    Also MTR is a great command for troubleshooting intermittent connectivity issues. If on windows, PingPlotter (not as robust as MTR).

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  4. This is exactly what "ping" does.

    I would bet a hundred dollars your system already has ping installed!

    Note that most versions of ping in modern releases have a flag that lets you set a "data pattern" for detecting specific bit errors.

    The following is from the ping man-page:

       -p pattern
          You  may  specify  up to 16 â?~â?~padâ?Tâ?T bytes to fill out the packet
          you send.  This is useful for diagnosing data-dependent problems
          in  a network.  For example, -p ff will cause the sent packet to
          be filled with all ones.

    Generally, sending all ones or all zeros will flesh out a hardware problem that has to do with the dropping of bits.

    RT

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  5. I recommend IXChariot. It can reproduce the flows of your app, on your ports. Simple to use and pretty cost effective for an all software implementation of a network test tool.

    IxChariot Website

    I don't sell it. I don't service it. I just find it to be an enormously cool and useful tool

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