Flowgrind is a testing and benchmarking tool to measure throughput and other metrics for TCP. It was originally developed to study performance and behavior of TCP variants within Wireless mesh networks. In contrast to similar tools like

Iperf Iperf is a tool for network performance measurement and tuning. It is a cross-platform tool that can produce standardized performance measurements for any network. Iperf has client and server functionality, and can create data streams to measure ...

Netperf Netperf is a software application that provides network bandwidth testing between two hosts on a network. It supports Unix domain sockets, TCP, SCTP, DLPI and UDP via BSD Sockets. Netperf provides a number of predefined tests e.g. to measure bul ...

it features a distributed architecture, where throughput and other metrics are measured between flowgrind

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

processes. The Flowgrind

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...

has the purpose to schedule such measurements and collect the measurement data. Inherent with this architecture and its designation for Wireless mesh networks flowgrind supports: * separation of measured traffic and control traffic (e.g., to measure the wireless performance, but don't let the control traffic interfere), * a simultaneous measurement between any number of hosts running the flowgrind server (e.g., to create wireless crosstalk), * uni-directional, bi-directional or sophisticated request/response tests (e.g., to simulate various usage scenarios and protocols) and *

packet capture A packet analyzer, also known as packet sniffer, protocol analyzer, or network analyzer, is a computer program or computer hardware such as a packet capture appliance, that can intercept and log traffic that passes over a computer network or p ...

support (e.g., for offline in-depth traffic analysis). Flowgrind allows the user to set various protocol parameters (e.g. the

Congestion control Network congestion in data networking and queueing theory is the reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node or link is carrying more data than it can handle. Typical effects include queueing delay, packet loss or the blocking of ...

algorithm) individually for each connection. This can be used to explore how certain settings affect network utilization and how they may compete which each other. Unlike most cross-platform testing tools, besides

application layer An application layer is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communications protocols and Interface (computing), interface methods used by Host (network), hosts in a communications network. An ''application layer'' abstraction is speci ...

metrics, Flowgrind can output some

transport layer In computer networking, the transport layer is a conceptual division of methods in the layered architecture of protocols in the network stack in the Internet protocol suite and the OSI model. The protocols of this layer provide end-to-end ...

metrics, which are usually internal to the

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

Stack. For example, on Linux this includes the kernel's estimation of the end-to-end round-trip time and the size of the

congestion window Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses a network congestion-avoidance algorithm that includes various aspects of an additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) scheme, along with other schemes including slow start and congestion window ...

References

{{reflist

External links

Flowgrind Homepage

Flowgrind
at

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Network performance

See also

References

External links