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Joe Harris, CCIE No. 6200 (R&S, Security & SP) is a Systems Engineer with Cisco Systems® specializing in Security. In addition to authoring Cisco Network Security Little Black Book, Joe has also been a technical reviewer for several Cisco Press publications and written articles, white papers, and presentations on various security technologies. He also assists various Certification Partners by beta testing their newest CCIE certification workbooks and has been recognized by Cisco as an SE Wall of Fame award winner.

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Tool: Iperf

July 28th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

Here is a nice tool that comes to use from Binh Phan called Iperf. It’s a great free tool for throughput testing of networking devices. For those of us who can’t afford to purchase those expensive Avalanche/Reflectors or Test Center from Spirent, Iperf works just great. I know of many customers that use this tool to test ASA 5580’s so you can imagine how powerful it can be.

Iperf was developed by NLANR/DAST as a modern alternative for measuring maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth performance. Iperf allows the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss. More information can be found @ the Iperf homepage:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/

There Are 7 Responses So Far. »

  1. Gravatar

    Comment by Peter on 28 July 2008:

    Check out Jperf on the same sourceforge page - it is a java front end for Iperf and shows a graph of the throughput per second.

  2. Gravatar

    Comment by Joe Harris on 28 July 2008:

    Peter my good man, you beat me to the punch!! That was to be my follow-up post ;-) … Your right jperf is the nice GUI front-end that really brings it all together.

  3. Gravatar

    Comment by Joe on 29 July 2008:

    Take a look at tcpbench from OpenBSD.

    http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tcpbench&apropos=0&sektion=1&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

  4. Gravatar

    Comment by slwkk on 29 July 2008:

    There is kernel space packet generator… you should take a look at:

    http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/networking/pktgen.txt

    in theory this is the most powerful traffic generator for linux… user space tools will always be slower.

  5. Gravatar

    Comment by Joe Harris on 29 July 2008:

    Guys thank you for the additional tools, when I get a little more free time I will be more than happy to test them out. Please keep the list of tools coming, this only helps us all. Thanks again.

  6. Gravatar

    Comment by pello on 30 July 2008:

    Hi Joe,

    How are you ?

    Here’s my list which complete input of others:

    - tfgen
    - netcps
    - pcausa test tcp
    - openwebload - http testing
    - sipp - sip testing
    - DPT - dns testing

    Francois

  7. Gravatar

    Comment by triegert on 4 August 2008:

    Not related to throughput testing, but nfdump is a really good netflow tool. We have used it to help create firewall rules for our server networks by querying netflow data with tcpdump-like expressions. Nfsen is a GUI for nfdump for those interested.

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