netperf

netperf — a minimalistic tool for measuring network data transfer performance in Go

Overview

netperf is an experimental, minimalistic, command line tool to measure performance of transferring data over the network.

It is intended to understand the penalty (if any) of developing data transfer tools in Go, as compared to tools developed in lower level languages, such as bbcp or iperf. It may also be useful for comparing the performance of exchanging data using different network protocols, such as raw TCP, TLS, HTTP(S), WebSockets, etc. under the same network conditions (e.g. bandwidth, latency, packet loss, etc.).

It consists of a client and a server. The server listens for network connections from clients (current only TCP and TLS are implemented). The client connects to the server and sends data during a specified period of time, using one or more network streams. After the data exchange period is finished, both the client and the server report on the observed throughput.

How to use

First, start a receiver for receiving data over TCP connections:

$ netperf receive -addr :5678

Then, start a client for sending data to the server launched in the previous step, during one minute, using 2 TCP streams:

$ netperf send -addr localhost:5678 -duration 1m -parallel 2
netperf: duration:                       1m0.000074495s
netperf: streams:                        2
netperf: data volume:                    299048.88 MiB
netperf: aggregated throughput:          4984.14 MiB/sec
netperf: avg/std throughput per stream:  2492.07 / 53.90 MiB/sec

This is the synopsis of the command:

$ netperf
USAGE:
    netperf receive [options]
    netperf send [options]

    netperf -help
    netperf -version

Use 'netperf -help' to get more detailed usage information.

For getting details on available options for each subcommand do netperf send -help or netperf receive -help.

Installation

To build from sources, you need the Go programming environment. Do:

go get -u github.com/airnandez/netperf

Feedback

Your feedback is welcome. Please feel free to provide it by opening an issue.

Credits

This tool is being developed and maintained by Fabio Hernandez at IN2P3 / CNRS computing center (Lyon, France).

License

Copyright 2016 Fabio Hernandez

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.