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Measure Your Network's Performance

You can roughly gauge your network's performance using Netperf. It performs data transfers between two hosts on your network, and reports on the transfer rate. It is easy to set up and gives plenty of useful information. If you want to explore the configuration options you can find out how to tune your setup for even better performance.

The 5-minute guide

Download the sources from the above site.
Find two systems on your network
Compile it on both using the usual ./configure ; make steps.
Pick one to be the server, run netserver there
Pick one to be the client, run netperf there, using the server's hostname or IP address, like so:
```
netperf -c -C -H server-hostname-here
```

Look at the Throughput column to find out how quickly your network transferred the test data.

Example Results

With larger message sizes I'm able to get around 151Mbps through a Belkin F5D5141-16 router. It seems that the bottleneck is not the router, it should be capable of 1000Mbps.

> netperf -c -C -H server -- -s 65536
TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to server (192.168.1.2) port 0 AF_INET
Recv   Send    Send                          Utilization       Service Demand
Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed              Send     Recv     Send    Recv
Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput  local    remote   local   remote
bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/s  % S      % S      us/KB   us/KB

 87380 131072 131072    10.01       150.70   71.53    65.81    38.881  35.772

Last modified on 26 Mar 2006 by AO