Testing Network with Iperf

Iperf is an traffic generator.
It is distributed under BSD License .
Iperf has a client and server functionality, and can measure the throughput between the two ends, either unidirectonally or bi-directionally. It is open source software and runs on various platforms including Linux, Unix and Windows. It is supported by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research.
When used for testing UDP capacity, Iperf allows the user to specify the datagram size and provides results for the datagram throughput and the packet loss.

Iperf can be downloaded here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/

OpenBSD install:

    # export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.8/packages/i386
    # pkg_add -vi iperf

Gentoo install:

    # USE=threads emerge iperf

Usage:

Server side:

    # iperf -s

Client side:

    # iperf -c 172.16.202.1

Where: 172.16.202.1 is ip address of server

Another example of usage:

bidirectional test

On client side execute:

    # iperf -c 172.16.202.1 -d

Using UDP mode

Server side:

    # iperf -s -u

Client side:

    # iperf -c 172.16.202.1 -u

See man pages for more details

Iperf GUI interface can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/xjperf/downloads/list

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