HP-UX TCP/IP Performance White Paper, March 2008

6.3.1 Measuring Throughput with Netperf Bulk Data transfer

Using the netperf bulk data transfer feature is useful for verifying the throughput between two hosts and

measure available bandwidth between two hosts.

On remote host B, start the netserver:

# netserver

Starting netserver at port 12865

Run netperf from host A:

# netperf -H hpipxprlan2 -l 60 -t TCP_STREAM -- -m 32768

TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to hpipxprlan2

(192.168.138.160) port 0 AF_INET

Recv Send Send

Socket Socket Message Elapsed

Size Size Size Time Throughput

bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/sec

32768 32768 32768 60.01 94.48

The default socket buffer size at the receiving side is 32768 bytes. The default socket buffer size at the

sending side is 32768 bytes. The message size is 32768, specified using -m option. The elapsed time is

60.01 seconds specified using -l option. The throughput obtained is 94.48 M bits/s.

6.3.2 Measuring Transaction Rate with Netperf request/response:

Request/response (RR) performance is often overlooked, yet it is just as important as bulk-transfer

performance. Netperf request/response traffic will be useful to simulate bursty types of network traffic such

as OLTP and short web transactions.

While a bulk-transfer test reports its results in units of bits or bytes transferred per second, an RR test reports

transactions per second where a transaction is defined as the completed exchange of a request and a

response. One can invert the transaction rate to arrive at the average round-trip latency.

Here is a sample of netperf request/response collected on host A:

# netperf -H hpipxprlan2 -l 60 -t TCP_RR -- -r 128,1024

TCP REQUEST/RESPONSE TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to

hpipxprlan2 (192.168.138.160) port 0 AF_INET

Local /Remote

Socket Size Request Resp. Elapsed Trans.

Send Recv Size Size Time Rate

bytes Bytes bytes bytes secs. per sec

32768 32768 128 1024 60.01 4998.65

32768 32768

The default socket buffer size at the receiving side is 32768 bytes. The default socket buffer size at the send

side is 32768 bytes. The request size is 128 bytes as specified by -r option. The response size is 1024

bytes as specified by the -r option. The elapsed time is 60.01 seconds specified using -l option. The

transaction rate obtained is 4998.65 transactions per second.