NetPipe for Network Measurement

NetPipe is a network performance measurement tool available from http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/netpipe/.

Testing

Below are some of the results that i ran using NetPipe. Two tests where ran, one for wireless 802.11g, and the other for wired 10/100Mbps One can clearly see the throughput of the network interface.

The Corega test as run across 2 Macs and the results was as expected. Pretty good for a switch that cost less than a SGD$100.

*Note: The xaxis label is supposed to be Message Size

Netpipe 3.6.2

Netpipe benchmark results

Compiling r8169

For the r8169 drivers, instead of using the default r8169.ko module, it is possible to obtain the r1000.ko module by compiling the provided drivers from Realtek. However, i have found that it does not greatly improve performance. At least on my Himiko machine. I have also edited the default interrupt handling from 20 to 40. This gives a smoother performance on the network, but takes up more resources.

Compiling tg3 (Broadcom NetExtreme Driver)

Kernel 2.6.19 is not able to copmile the official tg3 drivers by default. There is a need to edit the tg3.c file and change the headers from config.h to autoconf.h and add the utsrelease.h.

#include <linux/autoconf.h>
#include <linux/utsrelease.h>

It is also required to change the CHECKSUM_HW to CHECKSUM_PARTIAL in the code. Once done, there is a slight improve in performance in the tg3 driver. Otherwise, it is negligible on my machine.