From 478c2acc910a75a212175598972e01b8fba9ce1e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Daniel Borkmann Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 17:17:50 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] man: add ifpps.8 man page Finally I found some time and started writing man pages. This is a first one in a series of man pages for all tools. Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann --- man/ifpps.8 | 99 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 99 insertions(+) create mode 100644 man/ifpps.8 diff --git a/man/ifpps.8 b/man/ifpps.8 new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a0abba7c --- /dev/null +++ b/man/ifpps.8 @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +.\" netsniff-ng - the packet sniffing beast +.\" Copyright 2013 Daniel Borkmann. +.\" Subject to the GPL, version 2. + +.TH IFPPS 8 "03 March 2013" "Linux" "netsniff-ng toolkit" +.SH NAME +ifpps \- top-like networking and system statistics + +.SH SYNOPSIS + +\fB ifpps\fR { [\fIoptions\fR] | [\fIdevice\fR] } + +.SH DESCRIPTION + +ifpps is a small utility which periodically provides top-like networking +and system statistics from the kernel. ifpps gathers its data directly +from procfs files and does not apply any user space monitoring libraries +which would falsify statistics on high load. + +For instance, consider the following scenario: two directly connected +Linux machines with Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz CPUs, 4 GB RAM, and +an Intel 82566DC-2 Gigabit Ethernet NIC are used for performance evaluation. +One machine generates 64 byte network packets by using the kernel space +packet generator pktgen with a maximum possible packet rate. The other +machine displays statistics about incoming network packets by using i) +iptraf(8) and ii) ifpps. + +iptraf that incorporates pcap(3) shows an average packet rate of +246,000 pps while on the other hand ifpps shows an average packet rate of +1,378,000 pps. Hence, due to copying packets and deferring statistics +creation into user space, measurement error of approx. 460 per cent +occurs. Tools like iptraf might display much more information such as +TCP per flow statistics (therefore the use of the pcap library), which +is not implemented in ifpps, because overall networking statistics are +in our focus; statistics, which are also fairly reliable under high packet +load. + +.SH OPTIONS + +.SS -d , --dev +Networking device to fetch statistics from, e.g. eth0, wlan0. + +.SS -t