Iperf For Mac

Iperf is a great command line utility designed to help you analyze your internet traffic from the Terminal.app, without having to waste resources powering up a graphical user interface.

Since Iperf does not require additional dependencies and also comes with an installer package, getting the application up and running is extremely easy. Once the installation process is over, simply launch the Terminal.app and type ”Iperf --help” to view all the available options and capabilities.

When it comes to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Iperf is able to measure the bandwidth or to display the MSS/MTU size and the observed read sizes. You can adjust the TCP window size by modifying the socket buffers. The both client and server can have more than one connections at the same time.

When dealing with the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Iperf can create streams that have a user defined size, and is able to measure the packet loss and the delay jitter. Similarly, if pththreads are available, the client and the server are able to deal with multiple simultaneous connections.

The user has the possibility to personalize the Iperf  results by specifying the measurement units format (Kbits, Mbits, KBytes or MBytes) and the time length between periodic bandwidths reports.

Iperf will automatically select the best measurement unit for the current data size and is able to run representative streams in order to show details about the influence of link layer compressions on your bandwidth.

Iperf is able to run the server as a daemon or as a Windows NT service and will process multiple connections instead of shutting down after each test. In fact, you have the option to view intermediate, periodic bandwidth, jitter and loss reports at specified time intervals.

To sum up, Iperf is a very efficient command line tool designed to help you analyze your network performance by using simple tools.