Measuring network bandwidth

The previous discussion of ping and traceroute was on measuring the latency of a network and the number of hops between nodes.

The iperf application provides more metrics for a networks' performance. The iperf application is not installed by default, but it is provided by most distributions' package manager.

How to do it...

The iperf application must be installed on both ends of a link (a host and a client). Once iperf is installed, start the server end:

$ iperf -s

Then run the client side to generate throughput statistics:

$ iperf -c 192.168.1.36
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.36, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 19.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.44 port 46526 connected with 192.168.1.36 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   113 MBytes  94.7 Mbits/sec

The -m option instructs iperf to also find the Maximum...