Benchmarking network performance with Network Pipemeter, LMbench, and nuttcp
Network latency and bandwidth are the two metrics most likely to be of interest when you benchmark a network. Even though most service and product advertising focuses on bandwidth, at times the latency can be a more important metric.
Here's a look at three projects that include tools to test your network performance: nepim "network pipemeter," LMbench, and nuttcp.
For this article I built each utility from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine. I used nepim version 0.51, LMbench version 3, and nuttcp version 5.5.5.
For testing, I used a network link with two Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards configured for network bonding. As you'll see from the results, however, something obviously is not functioning correctly because I was unable to achieve the 2 gigabit theoretical bandwidth. The nepim and nuttcp benchmarks below show that communication from the server is faster than sending data to the server, which might be an effect of the network interface bonding.
nepim
nepim is packaged for openSUSE 11 as a 1-Click install but is not in the Fedora or Ubuntu repositories. It requires the liboop library to be installed, and this library too is packaged for openSUSE but not Fedora and Ubuntu. You can install liboop using the procedure.
nepim does not use autotools to build. To compile, you change into the src directory and run make. I found that to compile nepim I had to include an additional define in the Makefile to avoid a duplicate definition of a data structure. The change is shown below, together with the installation, as there is no target in the makefile.
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