speed-cli

Disclaimer: Tool is under active development. Some features are to be improved in correctness/performance and documentation. Open to contributions!

This tool provides comprehensive network performance measurements across TCP, UDP, and HTTP protocols. Built with Rust, it prioritizes maximum performance to help you isolate and identify network or infrastructure-related bottlenecks.

Why Another Network Testing Tool?

It's difficult to have one tool that tests your network conditions between two devices in a way that is representative of real-world traffic. Most tools focus and excel at specific aspects (e.g. iperf3 with TCP/UDP, speed test cools for HTTP throughput/latency). However, applications use a mixture of protocols with various characteristics. This tool is a framework to create synthetic but realistic network loads between any two devices, on any platform using Rust.

Features

• Multi-protocol support: TCP, UDP, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3
• High-performance: Built with Rust, optimized for high throughput and efficient resource usage
• Comprehensive metrics: Throughput, latency, jitter, packet loss, DNS performance
• Exporting: Results in JSON, CBOR and HTML formats
• Cross-platform: Optimized for popular platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows) and architectures (x86_64, ARM)

Installation

Build from source:

# Prerequisite: Rust installed via [rustup](https://rustup.rs/)
git clone https://github.com/justin13888/speed-cli
cd speed-cli
cargo install --path .

The binary name is speed-cli. Note, for the HTTPS server, you may provide your own TLS certificate and key files via --cert and --key, or else a dummy cert will be used. A convenience script ./gen-cert.sh is provided to generate self-signed certificates for testing purposes. This is not suitable for production use.

Quick Start

Note: If you're using HTTPS server, ensure you have cert.pem and key.pem files in the current directory or specify them with --cert and --key flags.

# Start server on default port
speed-cli server --all # All protocols (TCP, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS)
speed-cli server --tcp # TCP on default port 5201
speed-cli server --udp # UDP on default port 5201
speed-cli server --http # HTTP on default port 8080
speed-cli server --https # HTTPS on default port 8443

# Run server with specific port and interface
speed-cli server --http -p 8080 -b 192.168.1.100

# Run client test (with defaults)
speed-cli client --tcp -s <server-ip> # TCP test
speed-cli client --udp -s <server-ip> # UDP test
speed-cli client --http1 -s <server-ip> # HTTP/1.1 test
speed-cli client --http2 -s <server-ip> # HTTP/2 test
speed-cli client --h2c -s <server-ip> # HTTP/2 cleartext test
speed-cli client --http3 -s <server-ip> # HTTP/3 test

# Run HTTP client test against specific server for 60 seconds
speed-cli client --http -p 8080 -h 192.168.1.100 -d 60

# Run HTTP client test with 8 concurrent connections, and export results to JSON
speed-cli client --http -p 8080 -h 192.168.1.100 -c 4 -e results.json

# Run TCP client test against specific server
speed-cli client --tcp -p 5201 -h 192.168.1.100

# Print previously saved result
speed-cli report -f results.json

For more advanced usage, refer to help:

speed-cli -h
speed-cli client -h
speed-cli server -h

Exporting Results

Add a -e or --export flag to client commands to save results:

# Export to JSON
speed-cli client --<mode> -s <server-ip> -e results.json

# Export to CBOR
speed-cli client --<mode> -s <server-ip> -e results.cbor

# Export to HTML
speed-cli client --<mode> -s <server-ip> -e results.html

# If unknown extension, it assumes JSON
speed-cli client --<mode> -s <server-ip> -e results.test

Developer Notes

HTTP Test Endpoints

When running server with HTTP, the following endpoints are available:

• GET /download?size=<total_size>?chunk=<chunk_size> - Download test data
• POST /upload - Upload test endpoint
• GET /latency - Minimal latency test
• GET /info - Server information
• GET /health - Server health check

Future Improvements

There are several features/improvements that are planned.

• Updated --json output format
• OCI Container images using all popular base images (necessary for representative performance testing)
• Kubernetes support (for server)
• QUIC support (HTTP/3)
• gRPC support?
• Rich HTML report generation
• Support for more niche protocols (e.g. SFTP, SMB)
• Remove SSH server spin-up (remote SSH server downloads binary, or through client, and runs server based on what's specified by client)
• Mobile app support (iOS/Android)
• Firm up IPV6 support (which has different NAT characteristics)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! This tool aims to be the most comprehensive network testing suite available. Areas for improvement:

• Improve internal overhead of HTTP tests (e.g. to test against 25+ Gbps links)
• Additional protocol support (QUIC, HTTP/3, SFTP, SMB)
• More advanced topology analysis
• Real-time monitoring capabilities
• Web interface for results visualization
• Integration with network monitoring systems

License

This project is licensed under AGPL-3.0 License