Free high speed software for linux

Speed is a simple program to add a transfer meter to any console or terminal based copy program.
Speed allows you to easily report Kilobytes or Megabytes per second when using programs that do not report file transfer speeds (such as cp or ftp).
Usage:
./speed [ -u interval ] -f filename
./speed [ -u interval ] -- < copy_program > [args] /path/to/file /destination/file
< copy_program > is the program we should use to copy the file
[args] options arguments to < copy_program >
Enhancements:
- A progress bar has been added.
- The last argument to cp can be either a file or directory.

Typespeed project is a tool and game for testing your typing speed.
Typespeeds idea is ripped from ztspeed (a DOS game made by Zorlim). The Idea behind the game is rather easy: type words that are flying by from left to right as fast as you can. If you miss 10 or more words, game is over.
There exist 3 different game modes in typespeed:
- Single player: In this mode you can play for yourself and try to get a place in your top 10 list. As you enter correct words, the speed will increase, so watch out. You can even pause the game if you are skilled enough to play so long that you need a little break.
- Training: If single player is too fast for you or you want to concentrate on correct typing, training is the perfect choice for you! In this mode you can set a constant speed. Obviously no highscore game.
- Multiplayer: If you are brave enough to use our current network code (or sit in LAN with your friends), you can experience the most fun of typespeed: challenge an opponent. During the game, written words by you or your opponent will be thrown into the opposite game, so words can be strategicaly used to make life of your opponent even harder.
Typespeed is written in C and uses curses to display the menu and game. The network code is written using core library functions. As of now, the network code is rather unstable/buggy when it comes to high loads, so dont rely on internet games; LAN works fine (and of course localhost).
Generally any POSIX-compatible system with a curses library should work, although development concentrates on GNU/Linux and ncurses. Feel free to contribute patches for your system, too! Beside of that the following systems have been tested and/or have maintained ports:
- Cygwin
- Debian GNU/Linux
- FreeBSD
- OpenBSD

Azureus Speed Control is a project that enables automatic configuration of your upload limit. This addresses the problem of implicit additional upload when Azureus downloads with high speed, which can lead to connection choking. This is a problem specially for users with low upload bandwidth like German ADSL users.

If your download rate increases, the upload limit will be reduced by a value that can be customized. If the download rate decreases, the upload limit will increase again.

high-resolution-timer is a library with Java and C++ wrappers to implement high . These timers can be used, for example, to count the ticks when doing performance analysis.
high-resolution-timer exploits the system dependent timers/clocks and provides a timer-like interface to the same. The attached file has build scripts for Linux and Solaris. There is also a Java wrapper over the library, which uses JNI to use the timer interfaces.
Enhancements:
- The library is a basic approach to design a base for the performance library.
- It has not yet taken into consideration the details of library preloads, etc.
- At load time, the library initializes itself with the timer with the least avg resolution.
- At unload time, the library cleans up by freeing any allocated memory.
- The library provides a getErrorMessage function to let the user know the detailed report of the error.
- The library exports start / stop JNI wrappers .

The Wonder Shaper is a very special network shaper script with a lot of features. Works on Linux 2.4 & higher.

Goals

I attempted to create the holy grail:

* Maintain low latency for interfactive traffic at all times.

This means that downloading or uploading files should not disturb SSH or even telnet. These are the most important things, even 200ms latency is sluggish to work over.

* Allow surfing at reasonable speeds while up or downloading

Even though http is bulk traffic, other traffic should not drown it out too much.

* Make sure uploads dont harm downloads, and the other way around

This is a much observed phenomenon where upstream traffic simply destroys download speed. It turns out that all this is possible, at the cost of a tiny bit of bandwidth. The reason that uploads, downloads and ssh hurt eachother is the presence of large queues in many domestic access devices like cable or DSL modems.

Why it doesnt work well by default

ISPs know that they are benchmarked solely on how fast people can download. Besides available bandwidth, download speed is influenced heavily by packet loss, which seriously hampers TCP/IP performance. Large queues can help prevent packetloss, and speed up downloads. So ISPs configure large queues.

These large queues however damage interactivity. A keystroke must first travel the upstream queue, which may be seconds (!) long and go to your remote host. It is then displayed, which leads to a packet coming back, which must then traverse the downstream queue, located at your ISP, before it appears on your screen.

This HOWTO teaches you how to mangle and process the queue in many ways, but sadly, not all queues are accessible to us. The queue over at the ISP is completely off-limits, whereas the upstream queue probably lives inside your cable modem or DSL device. You may or may not be able to configure it. Most probably not.

So, what next? As we cant control either of those queues, they must be eliminated, and moved to your Linux router. Luckily this is possible.

Limit upload speed somewhat

By limiting our upload speed to slightly less than the truly available rate, no queues are built up in our modem. The queue is now moved to Linux.

Limit download speed

This is slightly trickier as we cant really influence how fast the internet ships us data. We can however drop packets that are coming in too fast, which causes TCP/IP to slow down to just the rate we want. Because we dont want to drop traffic unnecessarily, we configure a burst size we allow at higher speed.

Now, once we have done this, we have eliminated the downstream queue totally (except for short bursts), and gain the ability to manage the upstream queue with all the power Linux offers.

Let interactive traffic skip the queue

What remains to be done is to make sure interactive traffic jumps to the front of the upstream queue. To make sure that uploads dont hurt downloads, we also move ACK packets to the front of the queue. This is what normally causes the huge slowdown observed when generating bulk traffic both ways. The ACKnowledgements for downstream traffic must compete with upstream traffic, and get delayed in the process.

We also move other small packets to the front of the queue - this helps operating systems which do not set TOS bits, like everything from Microsoft.

Allow the user to specify low priority traffic (new in 1.1!)

Sometimes you may notice low priority OUTGOING traffic slowing down important traffic. In that case, the following options may help you:

NOPRIOHOSTSRC
Set this to hosts or netmasks in your network that should have low priority

NOPRIOHOSTDST
Set this to hosts or netmasks on the internet that should have low priority

NOPRIOPORTSRC
Set this to source ports that should have low priority. If you have an unimportant webserver on your traffic, set this to 80

NOPRIOPORTDST
Set this to destination ports that should have low priority.

See the start of wshaper and wshaper.htb

Results

If we do all this we get the following measurements using an excellent ADSL connection from xs4all in the Netherlands:

Baseline latency:
round-trip min/avg/max = 14.4/17.1/21.7 ms

Without traffic conditioner, while downloading:
round-trip min/avg/max = 560.9/573.6/586.4 ms

Without traffic conditioner, while uploading:
round-trip min/avg/max = 2041.4/2332.1/2427.6 ms

With conditioner, during 220kbit/s upload:
round-trip min/avg/max = 15.7/51.8/79.9 ms

With conditioner, during 850kbit/s download:
round-trip min/avg/max = 20.4/46.9/74.0 ms

When uploading, downloads proceed at ~80% of the available speed. Uploads at around 90%. Latency then jumps to 850 ms, still figuring out why.

What you can expect from this script depends a lot on your actual uplink speed. When uploading at full speed, there will always be a single packet ahead of your keystroke. That is the lower limit to the latency you can achieve - divide your MTU by your upstream speed to calculate. Typical values will be somewhat higher than that. Lower your MTU for better effects!

A small table:

Uplink speed | Expected latency due to upload
--------------------------------------------------
32 | 234ms
64 | 117ms
128 | 58ms
256 | 29ms

So to calculate your effective latency, take a baseline measurement (ping on an unloaded link), and look up the number in the table, and add it. That is about the best you can expect. This number comes from a calculation that assumes that your upstream keystroke will have at most half a full sized packet ahead of it.

This boils down to:

mtu * 0.5 * 10
-------------- + baseline_latency
kbit

The factor 10 is not quite correct but works well in practice.

Your kernel

If you run a recent distribution, everything should be ok. You need 2.4 with QoS options turned on.

If you compile your own kernel, it must have some options enabled. Most notably, in the Networking Options menu, QoS and/or Fair Queueing, turn at least CBQ, PRIO, SFQ, Ingress, Traffic Policing, QoS support, Rate Estimator, QoS classifier, U32 classifier, fwmark classifier.

In practice, I (and most distributions) just turn on everything.

The scripts

The script comes in two versions, one which works on standard kernels and is implemented using CBQ. The other one uses the excellent HTB qdisc which is not in the default kernel. The CBQ version is more tested than the HTB one!

See wshaper and wshaper.htb.

Tuning

These scripts need to know the real rate of your ISP connection. This is hard to determine upfront as different ISPs use different kinds of bits it appears. People report success using the following technique:

Estimate both your upstream and downstream at half the rate your ISP specifies. Now verify if the script is functioning - check interactivity while uploading and while downloading. This should deliver the latency as calculated above. If not, check if the script executed without errors.

Now slowly increase the upstream & downstream numbers in the script until the latency comes back. This way you can find optimum values for your connection. If you are happy, please report to me so I can make a list of numbers that work well. Please let me know which ISP you use and the name of your subscription, and its reputed specifications, so I can list you here and save others the trouble.

Installation

If you dial in, you can copy the script to /etc/ppp/ip-up.d and it will be run at each connect.

If you want to remove the shaper from an interface, run wshaper stop. To see status information, run wshaper status.

KNOWN PROBLEMS

If you get errors, add an -x to the first line, as follows:

#!/bin/bash -x

And retry. This will show you which line gives an error. Before contacting me, make sure that you are running a recent version of iproute!

Recent versions can be found at your Linux distributor, or if you prefer compiling, here:
ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/iproute2-current.tar.gz

The fairly fast packet filter (FFPF) is an approach to network packet processing that adds many new features to existing filtering solutions like BPF.
fairly fast packet filter is designed for high speed by pushing computationally intensive tasks to the kernel or even network processors and by minimising packet copying.
By providing both access to richer programming languages and explicit extensibility, it is also considerably more flexible than existing approaches.
FFPF provides a complete solution for network monitoring that caters to all applications available today. Exploiting its extensibility, the language can even be used as a meta-filter to `script together filters from other approaches, such as BPF.
Main features:
- fast: processes significantly more packets per second than LSF (reference)
- scalable: transparently supports hardware assist, like that given by the Intel IXP2x00 network processors
- backward compatible: supports all existing libpcap based applications
- extensible: separates functionality from the framework. FFPF currently ships with implementations of BPF, Aho Corasick, Boyer Moore Horspool, and many more
- modular: new functions can be written in as little as 3 lines of code
- secure: relies on Keynote for authentication and resource control
- open and standard adherent: licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It implements the Monitoring API (MAPI) draft as designed by the EU-SCAMPI consortium
Enhancements:
- enabled kernelspace processing
- enabled all 5 buffer implementations (Continuous, Fixed-size slot, Variable sized slot, Double ring and Index)
- added TCP stream reassembly and early implementation of zero-copy reassembly
- added PCAP input and output support, for userspace testing and offline use
- added additional minor functions: TCP Synprotect, output to files, ...
- added support for UDEV
- extended controlplane: flowspaces can now be queried for live state
- fixed up many bugs, hacks and irregularities.

libmysqltemplate project is a very high speed C state machine template library that uses MySQL data for the source of the templates and optionally for name/value pairs.

It is required for the mysqlApache2/mysqlMail2/iDNS family of openisp.net/unixservice.com Web based consoles for clusters and other complex Internet service infrastructure management.