Performance Measurements: Throughput

Baseline

A baseline of raw throughput can be established, i.e.

nc -d -l 9999 > /dev/null  &
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=10000 | nc localhost 9999

Some data points:

FreeBSD running in VM1 (VirtualBox) with 2 cores, host = Corei5 2.7 GHz:
10485760000 bytes transferred in 39.215871 secs (267385620 bytes/sec)
and both cores 70-90% load (all system)

Same test, but VM2 (FreeBSD, 2 Cores) on Corei7 3.4 GHz
10485760000 bytes transferred in 31.133329 secs (336801758 bytes/sec)

Over LAN GbE Switch:

VM1 => VM2
10485760000 bytes transferred in 243.212965 secs (43113491 bytes/sec)

VM2 => VM1
10485760000 bytes transferred in 160.086530 secs (65500576 bytes/sec)

This last number is 520MB/s raw net throughput.

Both hosts and VMs haven't been highly tuned for TCP throughput.