Henning Brauer wrote: > * Ronnie Garcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-06-06 13:04]: >> Henning Brauer a icrit : >>> * nate <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-06-05 21:44]: >>>> I built 3 OpenBSD 3.6(?) servers in mid 2005 with these cards, and >>>> was able to get a peak throughput of about 520Mbps in bridged mode >>>> (pf disabled) measured using iperf. >>> the single-stream tcp test iperf uses is pretty meaningless >>> (unless.. well, that's another story) >> What other tool would you recommend, then ? > > they all suck. > > best "simulation" is recording your real-world traffic using tcpdump and > then use tcpreplay. but that is tricky too.
Well if you're interested in working out a vaguely real benchmark for the throughput of your appliance I recommend you choose a type of traffic and focus on it. So perhaps that's HTTP, SMTP or some other obvious protocol. Pick a diverse corpus of files or emails to handle, then pass the traffic through the host and see how you go. If you're just looking for a big number, open a single TCP session and send alot of traffic through it so you don't have to continually start new sessions (sessions are comparatively expensive). Henning has something in saying that most of the tools aren't great, in the end all benchmarks are artificial in some measure. Replaying traffic is equally artificial as it's only indicative of the traffic you recorded - which is likely to be biased towards whatever was happening at the time on your LAN. When all's said and done, benchmark for the traffic you "expect" and work from there. HTH Dave
