NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | USAGE EXAMPLE | NOTE | LEGAL | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON | COLOPHON

IFPPS(8)                     netsniff-ng toolkit                    IFPPS(8)

NAME         top

       ifpps - top-like networking and system statistics

SYNOPSIS         top

       ifpps { [options] | [device] }

DESCRIPTION         top

       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 make use of any user
       space monitoring libraries which would falsify statistics under 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 which 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 packet copies and deferring
       statistics creation into user space, a measurement error of
       approximately 460 percent occurs. Tools like iptraf might display
       much more information such as TCP per flow statistics (hence the use
       of the pcap library). This is not possible with ifpps, because
       overall networking statistics are its focus; statistics, which are
       also fairly reliable under high packet load.
       ifpps also periodically displays CPU load, interrupt, software
       interrupt data per sample interval as well as total interrupts, all
       per CPU. In case the number of CPUs exceeds 5 or the number specified
       by the user with the “-n” command line option, ifpps will only
       display this number top heavy hitters. The topmost heavy hitter CPU
       will be marked with “+”.  The least heavy hitter will always be
       displayed and is marked with “-”. In addition, the average for all
       the above per-CPU data is shown. Optionally the median values can be
       displayed using the “-m” command line option.
       ifpps also supports directly the gnuplot(1) data sample format. This
       facilitates creation of gnuplot figures from ifpps time series.

OPTIONS         top

   -d <netdev>, --dev <netdev>
       Networking device to fetch statistics from, for example eth0, wlan0.
   -n, --num-cpus
       Set maximum number of top hitter CPUs (in terms of time spent in
       system/user mode) to display in ncurses mode, default is 10.
   -t <time>, --interval <time>
       Statistics refresh interval in milliseconds, default is 1000ms.
   -c, --csv
       Output (once) the ncurses data to the terminal as gnuplot(1)-ready
       data.
   -l, --loop
       Continuously output the terminal data after a refresh interval. This
       option is only available if option “-c” is given. For “-l” it is
       usually recommended to redirect the output into a file that is to be
       processed later with gnuplot(1).
   -m, --median
       Show median values across all CPUs for CPU load, interrupts (per
       interval and absolute) and software interrupts.
   -o, --omit-header
       Omit printing the CSV header. This option is only available if “-c”
       is given.
   -p, --promisc
       Turn on promiscuous mode for the given networking device.
   -P, --percentage
       Show percentage of current throughput in relation to theoretical line
       rate.
   -W, --no-warn
       Suppress possible warnings in the ncurses output, e.g. about a too
       low sampling interval that could cause performance regression.
   -v, --version
       Show version information.
   -h, --help
       Show user help.

USAGE EXAMPLE         top

   ifpps eth0
       Default ncurses output for the eth0 device.
   ifpps -pd eth0
       Ncurses output for the eth0 device in promiscuous mode.
   ifpps -lpcd wlan0 > plot.dat
       Continuous terminal output for the wlan0 device in promiscuous mode.

NOTE         top

       On 10Gbit/s cards or higher, receive and transmit statistics are
       usually accumulated at a higher duration interval than 1 second.
       Thus, it might be advisable to alter the timing to a higher
       accumulation interval for such cards.

LEGAL         top

       ifpps is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.

HISTORY         top

       ifpps was originally written for the netsniff-ng toolkit by Daniel
       Borkmann. It is currently maintained by Tobias Klauser
       <tklauser@distanz.ch> and Daniel Borkmann <dborkma@tik.ee.ethz.ch>.

SEE ALSO         top

       netsniff-ng(8), trafgen(8), mausezahn(8), bpfc(8), flowtop(8),
       astraceroute(8), curvetun(8)

AUTHOR         top

       Manpage was written by Daniel Borkmann.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the Linux netsniff-ng toolkit project. A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
       be found at http://netsniff-ng.org/.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the netsniff-ng (a free Linux networking
       toolkit) project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://netsniff-ng.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, send it to netsniff-ng@googlegroups.com.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository 
       ⟨git://github.com/netsniff-ng/netsniff-ng.git⟩ on 2017-07-05.  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or
       you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
       to man-pages@man7.org
Linux                           03 March 2013                       IFPPS(8)

Pages that refer to this page: astraceroute(8)bpfc(8)curvetun(8)flowtop(8)mausezahn(8)netsniff-ng(8)trafgen(8)