[netperf-talk] How to specifying the sessions number with netperf.

[Rick Jones]

william wrote:
> hi, folks:
> I want to use NetPerf for stress testing.
> Then how to specifying the sessions number for multi-sessions testing ?

I take it you want to have N concurrent connections going at the same
time yes?  With netperf classic (aka netperf2) there is no explicit
support for multi-session testing.  However, one can often get results
that are "good enough" by doing something along the lines of:

for i in 1 2 3 ... N
do
netperf ... -P 0 -v 0 -i 10 ... &
done

The -P 0 shuts-off the test banners, the -v 0 says just report the
single-figure of merit, and the -i says to repeat the run 10 times.

If you don't get any confidnece interval warnings, you can ass-u-me that
issues of start/stop skew were minimal.  If you do get confidence
interval warnings, you can increase the -i option as far as 30 and/or
increase the individual data point run times with the -l option until
you do.

The "best" thing to do for multiple, concurrent tests is to also start
working with netperf4:

http://www.netperf.org/svn/netperf4/trunk

and you would edit its XML ocnfig file accordingly.  Netperf4 has
explicit LOAD, MEASURE etc synchronization in it among other things.
Depends on a reasonably new libxml2 and glib-2.0.  IIRC the libxml2 in
Solaris10 is sufficient, but the glib is not.  See the README.solaris
file for details.

happy benchmarking,

rick jones