Measuring bandwidth with netio
Have you ever wondered how much bandwidth you are really getting to your server? Or how much of the advertised 54 mbit of your wifi are left when the access point is upstairs?
netio is designed to answer such questions, it measures transfer rates for either tcp or udp connections between a client and a server.
Installation is simple:
On most linux distros you can simply install netio via the internal package manager, i.e. on Gentoo type “emerge netio”. Another solution would be to download the zip file from the homepage, extract it and run one of the contained binaries (linux, windows and (!) os/2).
You will have to start netio on two computers: One will be the server and just generate and send data. The other will act as a client, receive the data and display the measured results.
To start the server simply start netio as follows:
netio -s
You can add the switches “-t” or “-u” to run the test explicitely via tcp or udp.
The next step is to start netio on the client system like this:
netio <server>
If you have specified “-t” or “-u” for the server you need to give the same parameter to the client. With <server> you have to specify either the ip address or hostname of the server machine.
That’s it, netio will send some data and show you the transfer rates.
netio homepage // netio on freshmeat
