Network Bandwidth Test

To easily test the bandwidth available between two UNIX or UNIX-like nodes, the following can be done. This test does not involve disk, SAN, etc, and so only tests system and network performance, with the system default network settings (window size, application buffers, RFC 1323, SACKs (RFC 2018), etc).

ksh$ ftp 10.1.2.3
Connected to 10.1.2.3.
220 localhost FTP server (Version 4.1 Sun Jun 13 21:46:07 CDT 2004) ready.
Name (localhost:stix): stix
331 Password required for stix.
Password:
230-Last login: Mon Mar 14 13:07:57 EDT 2005 on ftp from localhost
230 User stix logged in.
ftp> bin
200 Type set to I.
ftp> put "| dd if=/dev/zero bs=64k count=1600" /dev/null
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening data connection for /dev/null.
1600+0 records in.
1600+0 records out.
226 Transfer complete.
104857600 bytes sent in 8.857 seconds (1.156e+04 Kbytes/s)
local: | dd if=/dev/zero bs=64k count=1600 remote: /dev/null
ftp> close
221 Goodbye.
ftp> bye

Alternately, a tool like ttcp (C and Java), ttcp (Java) or iperf can be used.