[c-nsp] Free/low-cost traffic generator?

[Peter Rathlev]

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 10:10 -0700, Inca wrote:
> Does anyone know of a free (open source or otherwise) or low cost
> traffic generator that we can use to stress test multiple gigabit
> links simultaneously? Ideally, it would be a software package that one
> can install on *nix/OSX/Windows.

Any non-small collection of Windows machines will do this all by
themselves. :-)

Joke aside, you could use IPerf in UDP mode between to hosts:

server$ iperf -s -u -p 4999
client$ iperf -c <server_ip> -u -b 1000M -p 4999

If you just want to stress a link a don't care about measuring loss etc.
you could use "nc" in UDP mode sourcing from /dev/zero:

client$ dd if=/dev/zero count=666666 bs=1500 | nc -u <server_ip>

You might face some problems trying to make PC hardware deliver multi
gigabit loads, but several PCs in parallel can do it.

Regards,
Peter