TCP/IP Network Performance - Benchmarks and Tools
Utility software that measures TCP/IP performance at the application or protocol level can be helpful in benchmarking, troubleshooting and tuning of both local and Internet network connections. These five programs are among the most popular and proven benchmark tools for the job.
Netperf
An engineer at Hewlett-Packard developed Netperf to help the Unix network benchmarking community many years ago, and this benchmarking tool remains popular in Unix / Linux environments today.
NetSpec
NetSpec strives to implement more realistic network performance testing scenarios than the standard utilities by acocunting for variable traffic flows. NetSpec is an academic research project that includes source code.
Nettest
Nettest is a simple latency and bendwidth performance benchmark for point-to-point TCP connections on Solaris and Linux.
TTCP
The Test TCP (TTCP) Benchmarking Tool measures network performance at the TCP and UDP level. Originally developed for Unix, TTCP has also been ported to Windows and other operating systems.
DBS - Distributed Benchmark System
The Distributed Benchmark System (DBS) is a performance benchmark tool for TCP/IP networks that attempts to expand on the capability of other tools in this category. DBS supports retransmission control and congestion avoidance performance evaluation across multiple dynamic connections.