View article

This paper presents the design of NetPIPE, a new Network Protocol Independent Performance Evaluator. NetPIPE maps the performance of a network across a wide range and presents the data in a new manner. Its protocol independence allows for visualization of the overhead associated with a protocol layer. Using Net-PIPE has led to the discovery of a deep plunge in ATM performance for certain transfer block sizes, which is examined in detail. The performance drop is also shown to exist at certain block sizes for FDDI. Both aberrations are not detected by other benchmarks.