Overview

neper is a Linux networking performance tool that supports multithreads and multi-flows out of the box.

neper is recommended for intra-VPC testing because it stresses many short-lived TCP connections across multiple cores, while iperf3 mainly tests long-lived TCP throughput on a few sockets.

Prerequisites

Similar to an iperf3 test, you'll need:

• Server VM
• Client VM
• google/neper repo cloned on both VMs

Steps:

1. git clone the github repo google/neper on both VMs

2. cd into the /neper directory and run make all

3. On the VM you want running as the server, run the command:

./tcp_stream --num-threads 100

4. On the client, run the command: 

./tcp_stream -c --host <internal_ip> --num-flows 30 --num-threads 30 

The internal_ip is the internal IP address running the neper server.

After this runs, the server output should show similar speeds below and closer to the speeds posted in our doc:

throughput=167890.51
throughput_units=Mbit/s

Note

The performance speeds listed in our documentation reflect maximum theoretical throughput and are provided as reference values only. Actual performance may vary depending on workload characteristics on the VMs, VM placement, and other environmental factors, and we do not guarantee these speeds will be consistently achieved.

For example, while H100 instances are advertised with up to 200 Gbps of network bandwidth, approximately 25 GBps of that bandwidth is reserved for block storage traffic, which may impact the bandwidth available for other types of network traffic.

Additional Resources

VM Specifications