ifpps(8) — Linux manual page

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
       ⟨https://github.com/netsniff-ng/netsniff-ng⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-02-01.)  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)