[c-nsp] IPerf alternative

[Tim Rayner]

Thanks for an interesting discussion.

>________________________________________
>From: cisco-nsp [cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] on behalf of Saku Ytti [saku at ytti.fi]
>
>On 12 August 2017 at 18:21, Raymond Burkholder <ray at oneunified.net> wrote:
>
>> I have successfully run iperf bidirectionally in tcp as well as udp and hit
>> link limits, even on smaller, lower capacity linux based boxes.
>
>On what packet sizes? What link speeds? Linux UDP socket performance
>is terrible, even with rescvmmsg sendmmsg which iperf does not
>utilise, the performance is bad. XEON grade server CPU won't congest
>1GE single dir - 1.48Mpps, without loss.
>If you don't care/look at loss, or use low pps, it's different.
>
>If you use TCP you're measuring the host stacks TCP implementation,
>and you have no visibility on network quality, because packet loss is
>hidden from you.

There is now a version 3 of iperf available.  Most noticeable improvement from this perspective is that in TCP mode it shows the current window size and the number of re-transmissions at each reporting interval.  This makes it much easier to understand the behaviour of the transfer... You see the re-transmissions caused by any packet loss in real time, and its immediate impact on the TCP throughput.  I find this very helpful.

The packet loss is no longer hidden like it was with iperf_v2.

iperf3 doesn't interoperate with the old iperf (v2) - you need a version 3 at both ends.

Tim.

Tim Rayner
Optical Engineer, AARNet Pty Ltd
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