LAN speed test with no disk I/O

Q: I need a way to test LAN performance but I don’t want disk I/O to slow things down.

A: ftp can be used to exercise a network, probably the fastest handshake method without specialized programs. Here is a little known technique: Use the put command with dd and send the file to /dev/null on the remote end.

# ftp remoteSystemName
(user, password)
binary
put “| dd if=/dev/zero bs=32k count=10000” /dev/null
bye

What this code performs is to create a data stream using dd, then send the stream of zeros to the remote file /dev/null. This works between Unix systems where /dev/null is the bit bucket.

– See more at: http://serviceitdirect.com/blog/lan-speed-test-no-disk-io#sthash.mjXTD65E.dpuf


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