Network Pipemeter 0.40

Network Pipemeter is a tool for measuring available bandwidth between hosts. nepim is also useful to generate network traffic for testing purposes.
nepim operates in client/server mode, is able to handle multiple parallel traffic streams, reports periodic partial statistics along the testing, and supports IPv6.
nepim has been tested under Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD, though it should work under other platforms as well. If you manage to build nepim for different systems, please send the patch.
- nepim is useful to assess the throughput at the transport layer (TCP or UDP) as seen by applications.
- nepim runs single-threaded and should impose very light burden on your CPU. Unless, of course, your testing hosts have relatively high network bandwidth compared to low CPU power.
- One single server can service multiple clients simultaneously.
- As of nepim 0.11, one single client can interact simultaneously with multiple servers. For instance, suppose you want to test, from a single client, two remote servers, one located at 10.0.0.1,2000 and another at 192.168.0.1,3000:
- nepim -c 10.0.0.1,2000/192.168.0.1,3000
- The server listens to both TCP and UDP sockets. The client by default uses TCP sockets. Use the "-u" client option to switch the client operation to UDP.
- By default, only the server sends traffic towards the client. Use the "-s" client option to reverse the behavior, then only the client will send traffic. Use the "-d" client option to make both client and server to send traffic.
- Use the "-r" client option to establish an upper bit rate limit. Without a rate limiting option, nepim sends as fast as possible. See also "-R" below. Please notice the rate is specified in bps (bits per seconds); for instance, the following example states a rate limit of 100,000 bps (100 Kbps):
- nepim -c 10.0.0.1 -r 100000
- Use the "-R" client option to establish an upper "packet" rate limit (outbound rate limit for transport layer segments). Without a rate limiting option, nepim sends as fast as possible. If both "-r" and "-R" are given, nepim limits the sending rate at the lower of those bounds.
- Use the "-n" client option to run multiple parallel traffic streams.
- Use the "-b" server option to make the server to listen on specific local addresses.
- Use the "-6" option to disable IPv6 support.
Enhancements:
- Support for randomizing the UDP destination address/port has been added in order to put stress on routers with on-demand (dynamic) forwarding table caches.