commandliners

FreeBSD includes several benchmarking suites in the ports collection. One of these suites is netperf, developed by HP. It allows measuring several network parameters using two programs: the server and the client.

First things first: let us install netperf.

% cd /usr/ports/benchmarks/netperf && make install clean

Once the software has been successfully compiled (it does not take long) we can bring the server up:

$ netserver
Starting netserver at port 12865
Starting netserver at hostname 0.0.0.0 port 12865 and family AF_UNSPEC

Notice that you can launch the server as a regular user. Now, we are ready to run our test:

$ netperf -t TCP_STREAM
TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 0 AF_INET
Recv   Send    Send
Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed
Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput
bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/sec  

 65536  32768  32768    10.07    3842.31

This test is just a first step as it just shows how your network performs right now. After this, you should tune your system and run the test(s) again to compare the results. A list of tests can be found in the man page.

Enjoy!

PS: I’m not an HP employee. XD