1 .\" netsniff-ng - the packet sniffing beast
2 .\" Copyright 2013 Daniel Borkmann.
3 .\" Subject to the GPL, version 2.
5 .TH IFPPS 8 "03 March 2013" "Linux" "netsniff-ng toolkit"
7 ifpps \- top-like networking and system statistics
11 \fB ifpps\fR { [\fIoptions\fR] | [\fIdevice\fR] }
15 ifpps is a small utility which periodically provides top-like networking
16 and system statistics from the kernel. ifpps gathers its data directly
17 from procfs files and does not apply any user space monitoring libraries
18 which could falsify statistics on high load.
20 For instance, consider the following scenario: two directly connected
21 Linux machines, each with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz CPUs, 4 GB
22 RAM, and an Intel 82566DC-2 Gigabit Ethernet NIC, are used for performance
23 evaluation. One machine generates 64 byte network packets by using the
24 kernel space packet generator, pktgen, with a maximum possible packet rate.
25 The other machine displays statistics about incoming network packets by
26 using i) iptraf(8) and ii) ifpps.
28 iptraf which incorporates pcap(3) shows an average packet rate of
29 246,000 pps, while on the other hand, ifpps shows an average packet rate
30 of 1,378,000 pps. Hence, due to packet copies and deferring statistical
31 calculations to user space, a measurement error of approx. 460 per cent
32 occurs. Tools like iptraf might display much more information such as
33 TCP per flow statistics (therefore the use of the pcap library), which
34 is not implemented in ifpps, because overall networking statistics is
35 our focus; statistics, which are also fairly reliable under high packet
40 .SS -d <netdev>, --dev <netdev>
41 Networking device to fetch statistics from, e.g. eth0, wlan0.
43 .SS -t <time>, --interval <time>
44 Statistics refresh interval in milliseconds, default is 1000ms(1 sec).
47 Turn on promiscuous mode for the given networking device.
50 Output (once) the ncurses data to the terminal as gnuplot(1)-ready data.
53 Continuously output the terminal data after a refresh interval. This option
54 is available only if option ``-c'' is given. For ``-l'' it is usually
55 recommended to redirect the output into a file that will be processed
59 Show version information.
67 Default ncurses output for the eth0 device.
70 Ncurses output for the eth0 device in promiscuous mode.
72 .SS ifpps -lpcd wlan0 > plot.dat
73 Continuous terminal output for the wlan0 device in promiscuous mode.
76 On 10Gbit/s cards or higher, receive and transmit statistics are usually
77 accumulated at a higher duration interval than 1 second. Thus, it might
78 be advised to alter the timing option to a longer interval for such cards.
81 Systems with a fairly high number of cores (> 32) are currently not
82 supported. This should, however, not be a big deal to fix. The only
83 challenge would be to display the presented information in a sane way,
84 probably by selectively hiding uninteresting statistics.
87 ifpps is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.
91 was originally written for the netsniff-ng toolkit by Daniel Borkmann. It
92 is currently maintained by Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch> and Daniel
93 Borkmann <dborkma@tik.ee.ethz.ch>.
101 .BR astraceroute (8),
105 Manpage was written by Daniel Borkmann.