Iperf

Iperf
Developed by	The Iperf team
Latest release	2.0.4 / April 8, 2008
Operating system	Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, additional *NIX systems, Windows
Type	Bandwidth management
Website	Iperf on Sourceforge

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Iperf is a commonly used network testing tool that can create TCP and UDP data streams and measure the throughput of a network that is carrying them. Iperf is a modern tool for network performance measurement written in C++.

Iperf allows the user to set various parameters that can be used for testing a network, or alternately for optimizing or tuning a network. Iperf has a client and server functionality, and can measure the throughput between the two ends, either unidirectonally or bi-directionally. It is open source software and runs on various platforms including linux, unix and windows. It is supported by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research.

When used for testing UDP capacity, Iperf allows the user to specify the datagram size and provides results for the datagram throughput and the packet loss.

When used for testing TCP capacity, Iperf measures the throughput of the payload. One thing to note is that Iperf uses 1024*1024 for megabytes and 1000*1000 for megabits. There is a GUI front end available called jperf [1].

Typical Iperf output contains a timestamped report of the amount of data transferred and the throughput measured.

Iperf is significant as it is a standardized tool that can be run over any network and output standardized performance measurements. Thus it can be used for comparison of wired and wireless networking equipment and technologies in an unbiased way. As it is open source, the measurement methodology can be scrutinized by users.