Linux software for measuring network throughput, latency and jitter

Question

I am looking for multiple pieces of software to test the performance of one of my firewalls. The software in question needs to be compatible with Linux but other than that, I don't have many requirements.

Here is what I have discovered so far:

Throughput: iperf and netperf appear to be very popular in this category. Is there anything better or more realistic out there?

Latency: I have read that hrping provides accurate results for RTD.

Jitter: I've yet to find any software package that specifically mesasures jitter.

Are there any better alternatives to what I have mentioned above? I have read that NetFlow and its variations are good for measuring some of these metrics, but is there anything better?

Answer 1

Jitter: iperf shows this when using UDP.

Server

iperf -u -s

Client

iperf -u -c server_ip

results in something like

[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 11.8 MBytes 9.86 Mbits/sec 2.617 ms 9/ 8409 (0.11%)

Where 2.617 ms should be the jitter, the following the packet loss.

Answer 2

sudo apt-get install iperf3

On a server:

iperf3 -s

On a client:

iperf3 -c server_ip -u -b 10M -t 5 -i 1

where u selects UDP, b is a fixed bandwith amount, t is the total time interval and i the the printing time step. Example output:

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Jitter    Lost/Total Datagrams
[  5]   0.00-5.00   sec  5.96 MBytes  10.0 Mbits/sec  0.000 ms  0/4316 (0%)  sender
[  5]   0.00-5.00   sec  5.95 MBytes  9.98 Mbits/sec  1.193 ms  6/4316 (0.14%)  receiver

No latency measure.

Answer 3

MTR (AKA mtr from package mtr-tiny e.g. on Debian GNU/Linux) does not measure throughput but provides excellent latency statistics including jitter for which it can show current, average and worst jitter -o JMX.