Network Performance test, IPERF

  • Posted on 18/01/2019
  • /Under Testing

Issue:
I want to evaluate my network capabilty from a machine, server, environment.

Resolution:
IPERF is an industry standard tool for measuring network performance. It does this by establishing two nodes, a client and server partition and uses raw network calls to simulate and evaluate network performance. Unlike subjective tests like Windows FileCopy, iperf is not subject to overheads of SMB or FTP that might alter results of tests due to external factors.

  • Installing IPERF

Download the application from here (https://iperf.fr/download/windows/iperf-3.1.3-win64.zip))

This download needs to be copied to both servers to be used in the test, one will become the client and the other will be the server element.

  • Install into the c:\iperf folder – this is a command line tool so the remainder of the procedure should be followed from an ADMIN command prompt in the c:\iperf
  • In the CMD window on the server, type the following command: iperf3 –s

  • On the second machine, the client, run the following command: iperf3 –c <server IP address> -t 30 –P 10

  • This command will start a 30 second transmission test with 10 simultaneous connections
  • The test will now run through and an output similar to the below

The output shows the speed of the transfer and the amount of data transferred.

You can run this test multiple times from different machines and under different load scenarios can be very useful in measuring network performance.

Links:

IPerf additional features: https://iperf.fr/iperf-doc.php