A Chargen PSA

Thomas Ptacek | August 25th, 2005 | Filed Under: Uncategorized

Because “purpose of chargen” seems to be the one of the two modal Google queries landing people here (the other is “zero day”), let me take a moment to help my hapless search-engine audience.

• The purpose of chargen is to test server-to-client network performance (speed; packet drops, latency, ordering, etc) with known data.

• The purpose of discard is to test client-to-server network performance in the same manner.

• The purpose of echo is to test bidirectional performance (though when it was widely available, it also did well as a userland-level “ping” —- which is useful, because kernel pings are hooked up to interrupt handlers which may still run even when userland is frozen, and which may perform reasonably even when userland is under massive load).

And that’s One To Grow On!