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CESNET technical report number 18/2003

Performance Testing Tools

Jan Barto

30/10/2003

1 Abstract

The report describes properties and abilities of software tools for performance

testing. It also shows the tools comparison according to requirements for testing

tools described in RFC 2544 (Benchmarking Terminology for Network Intercon-

nection Devices).

2 IntroductionThis report is intended as a basic documentation for auxiliary utilities or pro-

grams that have been made for the purposes of evaluating transfer performance

between one or more PCs in the role of traffic generators and another one on

the receiving side. Section 3 3 describes requirements for software testing tools

according to RFC 2544. Available tools for performance testing are catalogued

by this document in section 4 4. This section also shows the testing tools com-

patibility with RFC 2544 and the evaluation of IPv6 support. The summary of

supported requirements for testing tools and IPv6 support can be seen in section

5 5.

3 Requirements for software performance testing

tools according to RFC-2544

3.1 User defined frame format

Testing tool should be able to use test frame formats defined in RFC 2544 -

Appendix C: Test Frame Formats. These exact frame formats should be used

for specific protocol/media combination (ex. IP/Ethernet) and for testing other

media combinations as a template. The frame size should be variable, sothat we can determine a full characterization of the DUT (Device Under Test)

performance. It might be useful to know the DUT performance under a number

of conditions, so we need to place some special frames into a normal test

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frames stream (ex. broadcast, management, routing update frames . . . ). These

modifiers could have a significant impact on an ability of a router to forward data

frames. The testing tool should be able to use a random destination address to

simulate multiple streams of data.

For more details about recommended frame formats see Appendix C included

with RFC 2544.

3.2 Verifying received framesThe receiver should discard any frames received during a test run that are not

actual forwarded test frames (ex. management frames, routing update frames

. . . ). It should verify the length of received frames and report the number of

dropped, duplicated frames, frames that were received out of order and the

number of gaps in the received frame numbering sequence. The testing tool

should verify that the all of the routing updates (see above in section User

defined frame format) were processed by the DUT.

3.3 Bidirectional traffic

Real network traffic is not in a single direction. To test the bidirectional perfor-

mance of a DUT, we need a testing tool, which can be run with the same data rate

in each direction. The sum of the data rates should not exceed the theoretical

limit for the media.

3.4 Setting inter-frame time gap

All the tests should be performed with both steady state traffic and with traffic

consisting of repeated bursts of frames. Because of needs to determine the

minimum interval between bursts, which the DUT can process with no frame

loss, we need to set the inter-frame time gap between defined frames (bursts).

4 Tools

Each tool is defined as follows:

Description

A description of the tools construction, and the implementation methodology of

the tests.

AutomationWhat steps are required to complete the test? What human intervention is

required?

CESNET technical report number 18/2003 2

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Settings possibilities

Summary of program settings possibilities.

Availability

How do you retrieve this tool and get more information about it?

Required Environment

Compilers, OS version, etc. required to build and/or run the associated tool.

RFC 2544 compatibility

Summary of requirements to testing tools according to RFC 2544 as defined in

section 3 3.

References

A list of publications relating to the tool, if any.

4.1 DBS 1.1.5

4.1.1 Description

DBS (Distributed Benchmark System) is aiming to give performance index withmulti-point configuration and also in order to measure changes of throughput.

It measures the performance of entire TCP functions in various operational

environments. DBS has the capability of both measuring and analyzing TCP

performance more in details. DBS is able to evaluate the three TCP control

mechanisms - flow control, retransmission control and congestion avoidance

control. The DBS can generate various situations where the three controls are

working together. The DBS can also generate UDP traffic for more realistic

benchmarking.

Figure 1: DBS architecture


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The DBS is composed of three programs. Figure shows an overview of the DBS

System Structure. The dbsc is a control program to handle monitoring program

launched on observed hosts. dbsd is a program for sending and receiving data

among observed hosts. These two programs are used for actual benchmarking.

The dbs view is used for data analysis. The details of these programs are

described below:

dbsc: DBS controller (Controlling Host)

The DBS controller is a program controlling the experiment of TCP/UDP data

transfer. Controller reads commands from a command file, then it asks the DBS

daemons to start data transfer experiments, and after receiving results from the

daemons, the DBS controller saves them into the local files.

dbsd: DBS daemon (Measuring Host)

The DBS daemon is a daemon program that is launched on the experimen-

tal hosts. It sends and receives network traffic according to the commands

instructed by the DBS controller.

dbs view: DBS viewer

The DBS viewer is a program for analysis data which is gathered by the DBS

controller. It draws graphs to reveal the transitions of sequence numbers,

changes of throughput, changes of delay times or other performance indexes.

If measuring host has only one network interface card, traffic of command/result

and measured traffic are transferred on the same network. This may influence

the measurement results. To avoid this influence, DBS controls command/result

and measured traffic are not transferred at the same time.

DBS implementation assumes that clocks on all the hosts participating to the

benchmark are synchronized.

4.1.2 Automation

Commands of execution are driven by a command file. Format of the command

file is as follows. When multiple data streams are transferred in the same test,

many configurations should be written in the same file.

# First Configuration

{

sender {configurations of sender; sending traffic pattern {s};}

receiver {configurations of receiver;receiving message pattern {s}configuration of the connection;

}


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# Second Configuration

{

sender {configurations of sender; sending traffic pattern {s};}

receiver {configurations of receiver;receiving message pattern {s}

configuration of the connection;

}

.

.

.

Format ofsending traffic pattern s

pattern

{

data size, message size, interval, wait time;

data size, message size, interval, wait time;

. . . ;

}

Figure 2: Patern parameters meaning

The traffic is modeled as a sequence of data chunks called frames. The size

of each frame may vary. Each frame may consist of several messages. A single

message is defined that it can be transferred in a single UDP datagram. If a

frame is longer than the UDP maximum transfer unit (64KB), the frame is split

into several messages. Between frames, there is a time gap called wait time

which implies the application overhead. The preparation time of each frame can

be treated as this wait time. Moreover, this model controls the frame intervals.

This frame interval can be used for modeling of an application level rate control.

Command File Sample


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# Sample file

{

sender {

hostname = host1;

port = 0;

send_buff = 65535;

recv_buff = 65535;

mem_align = 2048;pattern {2048, 2048, 0.0, 0.0}

}

receiver {

hostname = host2;

port = 20001;

recv_buff = 65535;

send_buff = 65535;

mem_align = 2048;

pattern {2048, 2048, 0.0, 0.0}

}

file = test1;

protocol = TCP;

start_time = 0.0;

end_time = 30;

send_times = 2048;

}

See http://www.kusa.ac.jp/ yukio-m/dbs/dbs man.html for more information

about constructing command file.

4.1.3 Settings possibilities

send/receive buffer size modification

setting the TCP no delay option

specify the starting time of data transfer for each connection

specify frame size and inter-frame time gap

specify test duration sending complicated traffic patterns


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Through tcp trace function, several TCP internal information such as TCP/IP

pseudo-headers, TCP congestion window size, round trip time, retransmission

timeout and other values in the TCB structure can be obtained.

4.1.4 Availability

See http://www.ai3.net/products/dbs1 for details of precise OS versions sup-

ported, and for download of the source code. Current implementation supports

BSDI BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, mkLinux, SunOS, IRIX, Ultrix, Digital

UNIX, NEWS OS, HP-UX.

4.1.5 Required Environment

C language compiler, UNIX-style socket API support.

4.1.6 RFC 2544 compatibility

User defined frame format

No Support

Verifying received frames

Checks only sequence numbers of received frames.

Bidirectional traffic

It could be made of two single traffics between specified hosts running at the

same time in the opposite direction.

Setting inter-frame time gap

Full Support

4.1.7 References

Performance and Control of Network Systems, Proceedings of SPIE, Volume

3231, November 1997(English)

DBS: a powerful tool for TCP performance evaluations2

Informating Processing Society of Japan, DPS, 95-DPS-71, July 1995 (Japanese)

A proposal of DBS: performance evaluation for TCP over multipoint connec-

tion3

Internet Conference 96, July 1996 (Japanese)

Design and Implementation of DBS: a performance evaluation system for TCP4

1

http://www.ai3.net/products/dbs2http://www.kusa.ac.jp/ yukio-m/papers/dbs paper.ps3http://www.kusa.ac.jp/ yukio-m/papers/dps9507.ps4http://www.kusa.ac.jp/ yukio-m/papers/conf96.ps


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Masters Thesis, Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Sci-

ence and Technology, March 7, 1996 (Japanese)

Design and Implementation of DBS: a performance evaluation system for multi-

point TCP connections5

Digest of Masters Thesis6

4.2 IPerf 1.7.0

4.2.1 Description

IPerf is a ttcp like tool with considerable advantages over it. Using a client-

server model to determine maximum bandwidth you can also measure delay

jitter, packet loss, determine MTU, support TCP window size, run tests by amount

transferred or for a specified period of time. Server can handle multiple simul-

taneous connections. Client can create UDP streams of specified bandwidth.

Client-server model can use for testing bidirectional mode called dual testing

mode. IPerf uses representative streams to test out how link layer compression

affects your achievable bandwidth and prints periodic intermediate bandwidth,

jitter, and loss reports at specified intervals. As one of the few also supportsIPv6.

4.2.2 Automation

It is command-line driven. Use the -D command line option to run the server as

a daemon and redirect the output to a file.

E.g. iperf -s -D > iperfLog.

Command line samples:

node2> iperf -s -u -l 32k -w 128k -i 1

-s = run IPerf in server mode

-u = use UDP instead TCP

-l 32k = buffer length

-w 128k = largest receivable datagram size

-i 1 = interval time in seconds between periodic reports

node1> iperf -c node2 -b 10m -l 32k -w 128k

5http://www.kusa.ac.jp/ yukio-m/papers/mthesis.ps6http://www.kusa.ac.jp/ yukio-m/papers/mthesis digest.ps


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-c = run IPerf in client mode

node2 = server address

-b 10m = UDP bandwidth to send at, in bits/sec - 10Mbit/sec



specify TCP maximum segment size

setting the TCP No Delay option

UDP server provides multicast mode

bidirectional testing mode

tradeoff testing mode (request/response test)

setting the number of simultaneous connections to make to the server(requires thread support on both the client and server)

specify the type-of-service (as defined in RFC 1349) for outgoing packets

specify the time-to-live for outgoing multicast packets

use a representative stream (from file or stdin) to measure bandwidth

specify test duration

4.2.4 Availability

Iperf is released as a distribution of the C++ source. Pre-compiled binaries for

selected operating systems are also available (Linux, FreeBSD, IRIX, MacOS, MS

Windows, OpenBSD, Solaris).

See http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/7 for more information about program,

for details of precise OS versions supported, and for download of the source

code.


C++ non cross-compiler7http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/


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Iperf can specify only data content of UDP packet in frame definition.


It determines packet loss only.

Bidirectional trafficFull Support


No Support

4.3 NetPerf 2.2pl4

4.3.1 Description

NetPerf is a benchmark that can be used to measure the performance of many dif-

ferent types of networking. It provides tests for both unidirectional throughput

and end-to-end latency. It also includes provisions for CPU utilization mea-surement. Its primary focus is on bulk data transfer and request/response

performance using either TCP or UDP and the BSD Sockets interface. There

are optional tests available to measure the performance of DLPI, Unix Domain

Sockets, the Fore ATM API and the HP HiPPI LLA interface.

NetPerf is designed around the basic client-server model. There are two pro-

grams - netperf and netserver. The first thing after running program is establishing

a control connection. This connection is used to pass test configuration infor-

mation and results to and from remote system. After this process is established

new connection - measurement connection. The test is performed and the re-

sults are displayed. NetPerf places no traffic on the control connection while atest is in progress.

NetPerf provides three types of transfers:

Bulk Data Transfer- also referred to as stream or unidirectional stream. This

test measures how fast one system can send data to another and/or how fast

that other system can receive it.

Request/Response Transfer- request/response performance is quoted as trans-

actions/sec for a given request and response size. A transaction is defined as

the exchange of a single request and a single response.

Connect/Request/Response - instead of simply measuring the performance of

request/response in the same connection, it establishes a new connection for

each request/response pair.


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NetPerf includes test which use a socket interface to IPv6, but the control con-

nection remains IPv4.

4.3.2 Automation

Execution as child of inetd requires editing of/etc/services and/etc/inetd.conf. To

assist in measuring, script files are provided with the NetPerf distribution (script

for measuring stream performance, script for measuring request/response per-

formance ...).

NetPerf is command-line driven.


node1> netserver -p 20000 -n 2

-p = listen on the specified port

-n = number of CPUs in the system

node2> netperf -t TCP_STREAM -H node1 -- -s 16384 -S 16K

-t = test name to perform (script filename)

-H = name of the remote system

-s = local send and receive socket buffer size

-S = the same as -s, but for remote system


send/receive buffer size modification of both systems (local/remote)

setting TCP No Delay option

setting the size of a burst of packets (used to pace the send rate when is

no flow control provided by the protocol being measured)


pre-fill buffers with data from file CPU rate calibration


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4.3.4 Availability

See http://www.netperf.org/netperf/NetperfPage.html 8 for more details or email

Rick Jones ([email protected]). Binaries are available here for HP/UX Irix, Solaris,

and Win32.


C language compiler, sockets.



NetPerf can only specify data content of UDP packet in frame definition.


No Support


No Support


Full Support

4.4 NetPIPE 3.3

4.4.1 Description

NetPIPE (Network Protocol Independent Performance Evaluator) is a protocol

independent performance tool for comparing different networks and protocols.

NetPIPE performs simple ping-pong tests, bouncing messages of increasing size

between two processes, whether across a network or within an SMP system.Message sizes are chosen at regular intervals, and with slight perturbations, to

provide a complete test of the communication system. Each data point involves

many ping-pong tests to provide an accurate timing. It also has an option to

measure performance without cache effects.

NetPIPE consists of two parts: a protocol independent driver, and a protocol

specific communication section. The communication section contains the nec-

essary functions to establish a connection, send and receive data, and close a

connection. This part is different for each protocol. However, the interface be-

tween the driver and protocol module remains the same. Therefore, the driver

does not have to be altered in order to change communication protocols.NetPIPE is a variable time benchmark, which increases the transfer block size

from a single byte until transmission time exceeds 1 second. For each block size

8http://www.netperf.org/netperf/NetperfPage.html


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c, three measurements are taken: c - p bytes, c bytes, and c + p bytes, where p is

a perturbation factor with a default value of 3. This perturbation allows analysis

of block sizes that are possibly slightly smaller or larger than an internal network

buffer.

NetPIPE uses a ping-pong transfer. This forces the network to transmit just the

data block without streaming other data blocks in with the message. The result

is the transfer time of a single block, thus providing the information necessary

to answer which block size is best, or what is the throughput given a block of

size k.

NetPIPE produces a file that contains the transfer time, throughput, block size,

and transfer time variance for each data point and is easily plotted by any

graphing package.

Some typical uses:

Measuring the overhead of message-passing protocols.

Help in tuning the optimization parameters of message-passing libraries. Identify dropouts in networking hardware.

Optimizing driver and OS parameters (socket buffer sizes, etc.).

4.4.2 Automation

NetPIPE is a command-line driven program.


node1> NPtcp -r -b 32768 -l 1 -u 1048576

-r = receiver

-b = send and receive TCP buffer sizes

-l = lower bound of block size

-u = upper bound of block size

node2> NPtcp -t -h node1 [options]

-t = transmitter

-h = remote host


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4.5 NetSpec 3.0

4.5.1 Description

NetSpec is a network level end-to-end performance evaluation tool for Network

Experimentation and Measurement. It provides a fairly generic framework that

allows a user to control multiple processes across multiple hosts from a central

point of control. It uses a scripting language that allows the user to define

multiple traffic flows from/to multiple computers. This allows an automatic and

reproducible test to be performed.

NetSpec exhibits many features like parallel and serial multiple connections, a

range of emulated traffic types (FTP, HTTP, MPEG, etc.) on the higher levels, the

most widely used transport protocols today, that is TCP and UDP, three different

traffic modes, scalability, and the ability to collect system level information from

the communicating systems as well as intermediate network nodes.

The following figure shows the basic NetSpec architecture.

Figure 3: NetSpec architecture

The controller is a process that supports the user interface, which is currently

a file containing a description of an experiment using a simple block structured

language in which the connection is the basic unit for an experiment and via

the control daemon controls the daemons implementing the test. For every

connection in the experiment, the corresponding test daemons are created.

These test daemons send or receive data transferred across the connection.

Each daemon is responsible for its own report generation after experiment


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execution is complete. The output report is delivered to the controller via the

control daemon for viewing by the user.

NetSpec supports three basic traffic modes:

Full Stream Mode

Also known as full blast mode, it instructs the test daemons to transmit data

as fast as possible.

Burst Mode

The hosts under test transmit data every some specific intervals, specified by

the burst period. The burst size and the burst period is passed as a parameter

by the user (in blocks/burst and bytes/block). This mode is very useful in

real world experiments where rate mismatches might reduce the throughput

dramatically.

Queued Burst Mode

The hosts under test transmit data every some specific intervals, specified by the

burst period. This mode is a variation of the basic burst algorithm and the burstsize and burst period are passed as a parameter by the user. The advantage

of this algorithm is that variations in available line rate will not cause it to miss

blocks generated by interrupts arriving before previous write completes. The

drawback is that characteristics of the traffic are influenced by the queuing delay.

4.5.2 Automation

NetSpec consists of several daemon types that are started and controlled by the

main netspec daemon (netspecd). NetSpec uses a scripting language that allows

the user to define multiple traffic flows from/to multiple computers. This allows

an automatic and reproducible test to be performed.

A test would be started with:

Netspec script.name

The script given below is of the most widely type used for a TCP point-topoint

connection. The first block specifies the characteristics of the traffic source,

while the second block specifies the characteristics of the receiver host.

Script file sample

1 cluster {

2 test host1 {

3 type = full (blocksize=32768, duration=30);


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4 protocol = tcp (window=32768);

5 own = host1:20200;

6 peer = host2:20200;

7 }

8 test host2 {

9 type = sink (blocksize=32768, duration=30);

10 protocol = tcp (window=32768);11 own = host2:20200;

12 peer = host1:20200;

13 }

14 }

Figure 4: Test setup with the invoked daemons over TCP

In this particular example, the host with name host1 is the sender system andthe host with name host2 is the receiver system. The sender (line 2) sends

data in full stream (line 3) mode; it transmits 32768 bytes as fast as possible for

30 seconds (duration of test). For this data transfer TCP (line 4) is used in the

transport layer with a window size of 32.7KB.

NetSpec can be installed in either of the two ways - inetd installation and stan-

dalone installation.


specify size of frames and inter-frame time gap in burst modes

setting traffic mode (full stream mode, burst mode or queued burst mode)

specify type of connection (point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or

multipoint-to-point connections)


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setting connection mode (serial, parallel or cluster)


specify protocol type

4.5.4 Availability

See http://www.ittc.ku.edu/netspec 11 for more details. NetSpec can run on a

variety of platforms. The following binaries are available: Digital Unix, Solaris,

Linux, SunOs, FreeBSD, Irix.

NetSpec manual can be found at http://www.ittc.ukans.edu/netspec/docs/NetSpecUser.pdf12


C language compiler



No Support


No Support


It could be made of two single traffics between specified hosts running at the

same time in the opposite direction.


Full Support

4.6 RUDE & CRUDE 0.70

4.6.1 Description

RUDE (Real-time UDP Data Emitter) is a small and flexible program that generates

traffic to the network, which can be received and logged on the other side of the

network with the CRUDE (Collector for RUDE). These programs can generate

and measure only UDP traffic. To observe several variables describing the

utilization of hardware resources (CPU load, number of interrupts etc.) can be

used another free software package - atsar. It can record in regular intervals the

11http://www.ittc.ku.edu/netspec12http://www.ittc.ukans.edu/netspec/docs/NetSpecUser.pdf


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values of various system counters and parameters together with timestamps,

for example the CPU load and number of interrupts generated by the network

interface cards. The rude/crude distribution contains several example Perl

scripts for basic processing of the decoded crude output and computing jitter.

Rude allows definitions of a number of concurrent UDP flows with varying

packet size and rate. The TOS field in the IP header can also be set. Reordered

and duplicated packets may arrive with arbitrary delays, hence a bitmask with

32 bits describing the fate of the last 32 packets of the flow is kept. Two typesof generated flow are implemented - constant and trace. Constant flow means

a constant-rate UDP flow, where the packet rate per second and packet size in

bytes can be specified. The trace option gives a reference to a text file where

the parameters of every single packet has to be given. The smallest time unit

for flow definition is 1 ms.

4.6.2 Automation

RUDE is driven by a script file, which is used to specify the generated flows.

Example of a simple script file follows:

START NOW

## FLOW 1: (flow ID = 25)

##

## Starts immediately at the specified START time with following parame

## 400 packets/second with 100 bytes/packet = 40kbytes/sec (1kbyte=1000

##

## Sets the TOS for this flow to LOW_DELAY (0x10)

##

## 9 seconds after that the flow is turned off...

##

0000 25 ON 3001 10.1.1.1:10001 CONSTANT 400 100

TOS 25 0x10

9000 25 OFF

## FLOW 2: (flow ID = 1)

##

## This flow acts as specified in the TRACE configuration file.

##

0000 1 ON 3002 10.1.1.1:10001 TRACE trace_file.txt9999 1 OFF

Here, the flows 25 and 1 (second field in each row) are specified. The numeric

values at the beginning of the rows are time offsets related to a predefined


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global origin when the flow is to be started or its parameters modified. The

destination IP address and port are defined as 10.1.1.1 and 10001, respectively,

and the source port as 3001, respectively 3002. The source IP address will be

determined at run-time as the address of egress interface. The second flow uses

for packets definition the external file - trace file.txt.

The following command line samples shows, how to run the specified script file.


sender> rude -s sample.cfg

-s = defines the script file to be used

receiver> crude


control the length of the test

specify the type-of-service (TOS) for outgoing packets

plenty of flows definition

TRACE flow - definition of packet size and time gap between packets (max.

time resolution = 1 microsecond)

CONSTANT flow = constant bit rate traffic (you may change packet size

and packet rate)

calculate some statistics on-the-fly

setting the process real-time priority

some visualization and statistical analysis - using grude script

4.6.4 Availability

For more details about installation and using RUDE/CRUDE see

http://rude.sourceforge.net.13 On this website can be downloaded also

the old releases of this utilities. The newest release can be found at

http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/r/rude/14.

13http://rude.sourceforge.net14http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/r/rude/


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C language compiler



No Support


No Support


No Support


Full Support

4.6.7 References

Lhotka L.: Software tools for router performance testing, Technical Report10/2001, CESNET, Prague, 2001.

4.7 TRENO (07/30/97)

4.7.1 Description

TRENO (Traceroute RENO) is a TCP throughput measurement tool, which is

based on sending UDP packets with low TTL in patterns that are controlled at

the user-level. Hosts and routers along the path to the final destination will send

back ICMP TTL Exceeded messages which have similar characteristics to TCP

ACK packets. TRENO also has an ICMP mode, which uses ICMP ECHO Requestsinstead of low TTL UDP packets. In this mode, you only get information about

the final destination. The same sized packets are sent in both directions, giving

you some information about the return path (request-response test). This allows

to measure throughput independent of the TCP implementation of end hosts.

TRENO has some limitations:

Each hop should run for at least 10 seconds.

Some routers do not respond to the Treno probes as quickly as they

forward packets. So the results of the Treno test will not accurately reflectthe bandwidth at these hops.

The Treno Server is single threaded, so if someone else is running tests

you will need to wait until they complete their work.


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For more details about these limitations, see TRENOs homepage.

4.7.2 Automation

Command-line driven. No server is required, and it only requires a single

argument of the machine to run the test to.


sender> treno -p 10 hostname

-p < s > = set the test duration



specify the (initial) MTU

specify used mode (ICMP or UDP packets)

4.7.4 Availability

See http://www.psc.edu/networking/treno info.html15 or e-mail Matt Mathis

([email protected]) or Jamshid Mahdavi ([email protected]).


C compiler, raw sockets.



No Support


Checks only sequence numbers of received frames.


No Support


No Support

15http://www.psc.edu/networking/treno info.html


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4.8 TTCP6 Revision: 3.8

4.8.1 Description

Originally written to move files around, TTCP became the classic throughput

benchmark or load generator, with the addition of support for sourcing to/from

memory. It can also be used as a traffic absorber. It has spawned many

variants, recent ones include support for UDP, IPv6, data pattern generation,

page alignment, and even alignment offset control.

4.8.2 Automation

It is the command-line driven tool. To use it, start the receiver on one side of the

path, then start the transmitter on the other side. The transmitting side sends

a specified number of TCP packets to the receiving side. At the end of the test,

the two sides display the number of bytes transmitted and the time elapsed for

the packets to pass from one end to the other.


receiver> ttcp6 -r -s -v -n100

-s (ttcp6 -r) : sink (discard) all data from network

sender> ttcp6 -t -s -v -n100 host

-s = (ttcp6 -t) : source a pattern to network

-v = verbose: print more statistics

-n = number of source buffers written to network



setting the TCP no delay option

using UDP instead of TCP

setting socket buffer size


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4.8.4 Availability

See ftp://ftp.arl.mil/pub/ttcp/16 which includes the most common variants avail-

able or e-mail ARL ([email protected]).

Download the latest version with IPv6 support from

ftp://ftp.bieringer.de/pub/linux/IPv6/ttcp/ttcp+ipv6-3.tar.gz17.


C compiler, BSD sockets.



No Support


No Support


No Support


No Support

5 Summary

5.1 RFC 2544 compatibility

5.2 IPv6 support

6 Conclusion

As we can see in the section 5 5 (Summary), none of the performance tools listed

above, supports all of the requirements mentioned in RFC 2544 and described

in section 3 3. Also IPv6 support is not an ordinary character. Only three of

these tools support IPv6 protocol.

The DBS 4.1 (Distributed Benchmark System) testing tool seems to be the best

of these performance testing tools we have tested. This utility allows a user tocontrol multiple processes across multiple hosts from a central point of control.

16ftp://ftp.arl.mil/pub/ttcp/17ftp://ftp.bieringer.de/pub/linux/IPv6/ttcp/ttcp+ipv6-3.tar.gz


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Figure 5: Summary of RFC 2544 compatibility

Figure 6: Summary of IPv6 support


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It uses a scripting language that allows the user to define multiple traffic flows

from/to multiple computers. This allows an automatic test to be performed. It

also supports definition of inter-frame time gap. Of course we have to modify

this auxiliary utility, so it can fulfill all of necessary requirements. Verifying

received frames is not well done. It checks only sequence numbers of received

frames, so the complete verification of received frames as defined in section 3 3

have to be made. A possibility of sending user defined frame format should be

appended to the DBS utility too, because we need to generate special traffic. Analternative testing tool we can modify and use is NetSpec 4.5. The conclusive

factor is simplicity of modifying the source codes of these tools.

References

[1] Parker S., Schmechel C.: Some Testing Tools for TCP Implementors

RFC 2398, August 1998

[2] Bradner S., McQuaid J.: Benchmarking Methodology for Network

Interconnect DevicesRFC 2544, March 1999

[3] Bradner S.: Benchmarking Terminology for Network Interconnection

Devices

RFC 1242, July 1991.

[4] DBS WWW pages

http://www.ai3.net/products/dbs 18

[5] IPerf WWW pages

http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf19

[6] NetPerf WWW pages and NetPerf manual included in archive

http://www.netperf.org/netperf/NetperfPage.html 20

[7] NetPIPE WWW pages

http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/netpipe 21

[8] NetSpec WWW pages

http://www.ittc.ku.edu/netspec 22

18http://www.ai3.net/products/dbs19 http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf20http://www.netperf.org/netperf/NetperfPage.html21http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/netpipe22http://www.ittc.ku.edu/netspec


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[9] NetSpec User Manual

http://www.ittc.ukans.edu/netspec/docs/NetSpecUser.pdf23

[10] RUDE & CRUDE WWW pages and the documentation added to the

source code

http://rude.sourceforge.net24

[11] Treno WWW pages

http://www.psc.edu/networking/treno info.html25

[12] TTCP documentation added to source code

23http://www.ittc.ukans.edu/netspec/docs/NetSpecUser.pdf24http://rude.sourceforge.net25http://www.psc.edu/networking/treno info.html


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