Often in my, now 20 years, networking career, I had to do some form of network performance testing. Use-cases varied, from troubleshooting a customer problem to testing new network hardware, and nowadays more and more Virtual network functions and software-based ‘bumps in the wire’.

I’ve always enjoyed playing with hardware-based traffic generators. My first experience with for example an IXIA hardware testing goes back to I think 2003, at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange where we were testing brand new Foundry 10G cards. These hardware-based testers were super powerful and a great tool to validate new gear, such as router line cards, firewalls, and IPsec gear. However, we don’t always have access to these hardware-based traffic generators, as they tend to be quite expensive or only available in a lab. In this blog, we will look at a software-based traffic generator that anyone can use - based on DPDK. As you’re going through this remember that the scripts and additional info can be found on my GitHub page here.

#dpdk #pktgen #network #xdp #linux based #linux