When my SCP throughput took a nose dive today, I tried to figure out a way to measure the raw bandwidth. Since I am a very lazy person I didn´t want to convert numbers all the time.
netcat is the natural choice to send/receive raw data to a network. But netcat outputs just a byte count at EOD. Pipe View came to help. This handy tool can be put into any shell pipe and visualizes the amount of data going through the pipe. Practice:
On the “server” type into your shell (Please note that 1337 is the port number. You can use another port. If you do so, do it on both sides. :) ):
$ nc -l 1337 | pv
On the “client” run:
$ cat /dev/zero | nc ip.of.ser.ver 1337
This will give you the following output on the server:
5,27GB 0:03:22 [ 24MB/s] [<=>
If you found this hint useful please leave me a comment.
Further information:
- Netcat: http://netcat.sourceforge.net/
- Pipe View: http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml
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Thanks Ninan, I found this very useful although I’d like a way to do this without using pv as typically it’s not installed as part of the base platform.