Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Measuring Network Speeds with Netcat and Dd

I've seen a few posts on the web about testing your network speeds with netcat, but they all seem to not work with recent versions of netcat.

On one machine, run:

nc -v -l 2222 > /dev/null


(Make sure you're not blocking connections to 2222!)

On a second machine, run:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024K count=512 | nc -v $IP_OF_FIRST_MACHINE 2222


dd will give you your speed:

536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 4.87526 s, 117 MB/s


Yay, gigabit!


ymmv, test with /dev/zero at your own risk. Speak with your NOC before starting any network infrastructure changes.

7 comments:

  1. Have you considered using iperf?

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  2. iperf seems to work just fine (I hadn't known about it before Martin's reply).

    ReplyDelete
  3. ttcp is also really good for testing line speeds between two machines.

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  4. [...] used jbowes method of performance testing. I ran nc on the [...]

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  5. Actually used this to test wifi speeds around my house between laptop and a wired server!! Very helpful, thank you. :)

    ReplyDelete

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