Testing network performance between two hosts

[Handruin]

What have you guys done/used in the past to measure the performance of a single network connection between two systems?

I'm looking for a way to test if a network driver change has improved or hurt network performance. One host is Linux and the other host will be windows. I was looking for some software or method that is more involved than simply copying a file from A to B.

 

[ddrueding]

No info, but also interested.

 

[Mercutio]

On the Windows side you could set up a Counter log to monitor bandwidth on that network interface, but that's going to depend as much on utilization as anything else.

You should also be able to get some pretty thorough monitoring from SNMP on one side or the other, but that might be overkill for what you want.

 

[P5-133XL]

A quick google search gave me this site:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html

It looks useful.

 

[Handruin]

I'm looking more for a benchmarking tool for testing a network connection between two systems. I need something to generate some type of load on a network. This would need to be similar to how we've measured hard drives with ATTO or intel's IO meter. I was googling for a while yesterday looking up tools but there didn't seem to be anything clear cut for this.

 

[Will Rickards]

Ask here http://serverfault.com/

 

[Handruin]

Thanks Will. That website looks very similar to stackoverflow. I wonder if it's by the same folks. I'll ask there.

 

[Handruin]

It apparently is in relationship to stackoverflow. There is a link at the bottom...

 

[blakerwry]

Netperf sounds like what you are looking for.

http://www.netperf.org

You can get some windows binaries here - ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/benchmarks/netperf/binaries/2.1/win32/x86/


Runs as a CLI program, sending traffic between two hosts - one as the listener (server) and the other as the client. Be sure to test both ways.