A lot of performance tools are very web-oriented these days. Here are a list of tools for simulating network traffic conditions and check throughput, delay, jitter, etc.

Bandwidth Testers

These programs attempt to determine the throughput, delay, jitter, and other factors of a network.

• thrulay — “used to measure the capacity, delay, and other performance metrics of a network by sending a bulk TCP or UDP stream over it.”
• Distributed Benchmarking System — “A performance measurement tool for TCP/IP Network”
• iperf — UDP/TCP bandwidth testing tool which “reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss. “
• Pathrate/pathload — test the capacity and bandwidth of a network path
• uperf — uperf is unique among the performance tools in that it allows you to define complex network traffic characteristics and then generates traffic from that specification.

Network Simulators

• nistnet — nistnet allows you to simulate a portion of the network, introducing delay,jitter, etc into your network traffic
• ssfnet — emulate an entire network to find performance problems.
• netem — introduce delay, jitter, etc between networks in order to emulate a WAN.

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