Iperf is a tool for

network performance Network performance refers to measures of service quality of a network as seen by the customer. There are many different ways to measure the performance of a network, as each network is different in nature and design. Performance can also be model ...

measurement and tuning. It is a cross-platform tool that can produce standardized performance measurements for any network. Iperf has

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 ...

and

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 ...

functionality, and can create

data stream In connection-oriented communication, a data stream is the transmission of a sequence of digitally encoded coherent signals to convey information. Typically, the transmitted symbols are grouped into a series of packets. Data streaming has bec ...

s to measure the

throughput Network throughput (or just throughput, when in context) refers to the rate of message delivery over a communication channel, such as Ethernet or packet radio, in a communication network. The data that these messages contain may be delivered ov ...

between the two ends in one or both directions. Typical iperf output contains a time-stamped report of the amount of data transferred and the throughput measured. The data streams can be either

Transmission Control Protocol The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly ...

(TCP) or

User Datagram Protocol In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. ...

(UDP): * ''UDP'': When used for testing UDP capacity, iperf allows the user to specify the

datagram A datagram is a basic transfer unit associated with a packet-switched network. Datagrams are typically structured in header and payload sections. Datagrams provide a connectionless communication service across a packet-switched network. The del ...

size and provides results for the datagram throughput and the

packet Packet may refer to: * A small container or pouch ** Packet (container), a small single use container ** Cigarette packet ** Sugar packet * Network packet, a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-mode computer network * Packet radio, a form ...

loss. * ''TCP'': When used for testing TCP capacity, iperf measures the throughput of the payload. Iperf uses 1024 × 1024 for

mebibyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s and 1000 × 1000 for

megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...

s. Iperf is

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

written in C, and it runs on various platforms including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

(either natively or inside

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin in ...

). The availability of the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

enables the user to scrutinize the measurement methodology. Iperf is a compatible reimplementation of the

ttcp The program ttcp (Test TCP) is a utility for measuring network throughput, popular on Unix systems. It measures the network throughput between two systems using the TCP or optionally UDP protocols. It was written by Mike Muuss and Terry Slat ...

program that was developed at the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...

at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

by the Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST) of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), which was shut down on December 31, 2006, on termination of funding by the United States

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

iperf3

Iperf3 is a rewrite of iperf from scratch to create a smaller, simpler code base. It also includes a library version which enables other programs to use the provided functionality. Another change is that iperf3 is single threaded while iperf2 is multi-threaded. Iperf3 was started in 2009, with the first release in January 2014. Iperf3 is not backwards compatible with iperf2.
Iperf3
doesn't officially support Windows, only Linux
Vivien Guéant
did compile it to Windows back in 2016 but hasn't been maintained since. Many Linux distributions have up-to-date versions of iperf3 in their native package repositories (as of 1. December 2021)

References

External links

Iperf 2 & Iperf 3 Comparison Table
* * {{cite web , url=http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3657236/Measure-Network-Performance-with-iperf.htm , title=Measure Network Performance with iperf , first=Carla , last=Schroder , date=2007-01-31 Network performance Software using the BSD license Free software programmed in C

iperf3

See also

References

External links