Solaris and Linux tools

The following tools are available for both Solaris and Linux.

Tool Description
Netperf

Netperf is a network benchmarking tool that can be used to measure the throughput of many different types of TCP and UDP connections. Netperf provides tests for both unidirectional throughput, and end-to-end latency.

Note: Be sure to compile netperf with histogram support.
To simulate the network traffic to a MDEX Engine with average result pages of 50,000 bytes, run netperf like this: 
netperf -l 600 -v 2 -H remotehost -p 8899 
-t TCP_CRR -- -r 200, 50000
where:
  • -l is the length of the test in seconds
  • -v specifies verbose output level
  • -H indicates the host where netserver is running
  • -p indicates the port that was given to the netserver process
  • -t indicates the test to run. TCP_CRR is the TCP test that opens a new TCP connection for each request/response
  • -r specifies the request/response characteristics, in this case a 200 byte request (approximately the size of a URL) and a 50K result

For information and downloads, see http://www.netperf.org.

Top

Top is a UNIX utility you can use to quickly identify top CPU-using processes. It is a popular and common tool for monitoring system-wide process activity.

For information and downloads, see http://www.groupsys.com/top.

Sar

Sar reports system activity on single processor systems. It reports the status of counters in the operating system that are incremented as the system performs various activities. These include counters for CPU utilization, buffer usage, disk I/O activity, TTY device activity, switching and system-call activity, file access, queue activity, inter-process communications, swapping and paging.

On Solaris, sar is part of the system activity reporter package. On Linux, it is part of the downloadable sysstat package.

iostat

The iostat utility iteratively reports terminal, disk, and tape I/O activity, as well as CPU utilization.

On Solaris, iostat is built in to the operating system. On Linux, it is part of the downloadable sysstat package.