Matt Rowley wrote: >>> best "simulation" is recording your real-world traffic using tcpdump and >>> then use tcpreplay. but that is tricky too. >> 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. > > Also worth noting is that if you're generating traffic from a single host, > you're bound by the interrupt rates that host is capable of. Generate > traffic from multiple sources if you really want to gauge high load.
Definitely. My personal experience is that an e1000 tops out at about ~820-850 Mb/s of raw throughput - i.e. on a single TCP session. Other things that may get in the way of Truly Awesome Throughput (TM) include things like socket timeouts on either client or server host, and file descriptors ; note that those only come into play when you're trying to simulate a web server or the like. However I'm not aware of any tools that handle that kind of distributed benchmark.. anyone ?
