How to test ftp throughput in UNIX

When you have performance issue with the network or ftp transfer, you can use test the throughput by using pipe and dd command.

The following example transfer a 10000 X 32k blocksize of data to /dev/null in remote server. So no file will be overwritten.

$ ftp remote_server

ftp> bin

200 Type set to I.

ftp> put "|dd if=/dev/zero bs=32k count=10000" /dev/null

200 PORT command successful.

150 Opening data connection for /dev/null.

10000+0 records in.

10000+0 records out.

226 Transfer complete.

327680000 bytes sent in 28.91 seconds (1.107e+04 Kbytes/s)

local: dd if=/dev/zero bs=32k count=10000 remote: /dev/null

ftp> bye

in the test above we get 1.107e+04 Kbytes/s, which is 11070Kb/s. And it is a 100Mb/s NIC card. So the network throughput is normal.