Installation and usage of netperf

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Installation and usage of netperf

As name implies netperf is used to estimate network performance in various respects using tcp and udp. There is lot of help available in net, just do a simple search is enough.

What ever iam providing here is a simple installation procedure and a small examples.
$wget ftp://ftp.netperf.org/netperf/netperf-2.4.5.tar.bz2
$./configuration
$make
$su
#make install

There is a latest version is availabel but i got some issues after installation and went back to this version insted of debugging. (Lack of time).

For simple test run
#netserver
This will run netperf server, this first time run at local machine.

Now run
#netperf
TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) port 0 AF_INET
Recv Send Send
Socket Socket Message Elapsed
Size Size Size Time Throughput
bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/sec

87380 16384 16384 10.01 3684.63

Now these are the statistics when server and client are running on same machine.
Lets try on remote machine(192.168.2.190).
[root@remote net]#netserver
Starting netserver at port 12865
Starting netserver at hostname 0.0.0.0 port 12865 and family AF_UNSPEC

Now server is ready and starting client at local machien is required.

[root@localhost net]# netperf -H 192.168.2.196
TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to 192.168.2.196 (192.168.2.196) port 0 AF_INET
Recv Send Send
Socket Socket Message Elapsed
Size Size Size Time Throughput
bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/sec

87380 16384 16384 10.23 94.15

Oh!! throughput 94.15 ofcource expected value will be less compared to localhost.

There is lot of options available with this.