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lfaraone
Asked: 2009-06-27 12:40:53 +0800 CST

Measure data transfer throughput?

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How can I benchmark the network transfer speed of my servers? We already have an existing file server, but it is fairly old. We recently got a donation of a (relatively) newer P4 box, and I wanted to find a way to test its network+disk I/O speeds to determine if the speed benefit is worth the work to set up a new server.

We're using Debian Lenny as our OS, and all our clients are connecting via HTTP.

http debian bandwidth metrics latency

9 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you wanted to just have a look on the bandwidth actually used, give nload a shot.

    I always prefer testing the daemon which is serving clients (wget/curl when testing a webserver, lftp for ftp-servers, etc). Artificial tests like iperf are better to check the general throughput of your routers, switches, NICs and IP stacks.

    HTH,
    PEra

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  3. WGET will show transfer rates. Stick a large temporary file up on the server (say, dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=200) and bring it down w/ HTTP. Watch out if you're doing any kind of compression in your HTTP server-- I believe new WGET builds can do gzip encoding.

    Edit:

    One could argue that you should probably create a script w/ wget to poll a group of URLs that are similiar in composition as to what a "typical" visitor to the site would be accessing, as well. What I describe above is raw brute-force network / IO bandwidth testing (albeit influenced by disk caching, no doubt). Testing a potentially randomly-generated set of requests w/ wget would be another good test case, too. You could have a lot of fun with this one... >smile<

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  4. iperf. Or if you want to go old-school, ttcp.

    http://www.carumba.com/src/ttcp.c

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  5. iperf for network bandwidth testing, bonnie++ and/or iozone for disk testing. All of them can be found in the debian repositories.

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  6. Simple and quick solution:

    wget http://myserver/large.file.avi

    At the end wget command will print the throughput.

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  7. I found this paper http://www.nik.no/2009/06-Hansen.pdf provides very good comparison of online and standalone bandwidth test tools. It includes Abget, Pathload, Netperf and Iperf.

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  8. I've had good luck with netperf for looking into network traffic performance issues. I found this debian link for it.

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  9. Give Siege a go.

    Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility.

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