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How to Measure the Throughput of a Network- Iperf

Iperf is a commonly used network testing tool for measuring maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth performance (throughput) of a network. Iperf allows the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.

Iperf allows the user to set various parameters that can be used for testing a network, or alternately for optimizing or tuning a network. 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.

Typical Iperf output contains a timestamped report of the amount of data transferred and the throughput measured. Iperf is significant as it is a cross-platform tool that can be run over any network and output standardized performance measurements. Thus it can be used for comparison of wired and wireless networking equipment and technologies in an unbiased way.
There are two versions of Iperf being maintained, Iperf 2.x and Iperf3. iperf3 is a new implementation from scratch, with the goal of a smaller, simpler code base, and a library version of the functionality that can be used in other programs. iperf3 is not backwards compatible with iperf2.x

Iperf Installation:
sudo apt-get install iperf
Using Iperf:
By default, the Iperf client connects to the Iperf server on the TCP port 5001 and the bandwidth displayed by Iperf is the bandwidth from the client to the server.
If you want to use UDP tests, use the -u argument. The -d and -r Iperf client arguments measure the bi-directional bandwidths.

Run the following command on the server:
iperf -s
Run the following command on the client side:
iperf -c <server IP address>
And, you should see performance of you network on the server side.




1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Before running Iperf you might need to first confirm the UDP or TCP port isn't blocked first.

You can do that with Firebind at http://www.firebind.com

Just choose the Java Applet and you can enter any TCP or UDP port (or range of ports) and test whether any of the selected ports is being blocked by a firewall.

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