echoping Home Page

"echoping" is a small program to test (approximatively) performances of a remote host by sending it requests such as HTTP requests.

To install it, see the INSTALL file. Or type "./configure --config-cache&& make && sudo make install" if you're in a hurry :-) Several operating systems have echoping already packaged (Debian, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD). Download, if you wish. You may be interested also in SourceForge's page about echoping, with the bug reports, etc. You may prefer access the latest developments via Subversion: the module is named "SRC"; but be careful, this is not for the faint of heart and you need to master GNU auto* tools.

To use it, simply:

% echoping machine.somewhere.org

or use the options before the machine name (see the man page).

See the DETAILS file for various traps when benchmarking networks, specially with this program.

In any case, be polite: don't bother the remote host with many repeated requests, especially with large size. Ask for permission if you often test hosts which aren't yours.

Current features:

• plugins, so you can extend echoping with any protocol you like and/or use,
• Supports IPv6 as well as IPv4,
• Supports IDN (Unicode domain names like caf?.gennic.net),
• uses the protocols echo, discard, chargen or HTTP,
• can use cryptographic connections with HTTP,
• uses UDP instead of TCP for the protocols which accept it (like echo),
• can repeat the test and display various measures about it,

Known bugs

Examples of output:

1. (Simple test with 1000 bytes echo TCP packets)

   % echoping -v -s 1000 mycisco
   This is echoping, version 5.0.0.
   Trying to connect to internet address 172.21.0.14 7 to transmit 1000 bytes...
   Connected...
   TCP Latency: 0.003165 seconds
   Sent (1000 bytes)...
   Application Latency: 0.322183 seconds
   1000 bytes read from server.
   Checked
   Elapsed time: 0.326960 seconds
   

2. (Repeated tests with average / mean and median displayed.)

   % echoping -n 10 faraway-machine
   [...]
   Minimum time: 6.722336 seconds (38 bytes per sec.)
   Maximum time: 17.975060 seconds (14 bytes per sec.)
   Average time: 10.873267 seconds (24 bytes per sec.)
   Standard deviation: 3.102793
   Median  time: 9.218506 seconds (28 bytes per sec.)
   

3. (Testing a Web server with an HTTP request for its home page.)

   %  echoping -h / mywww
   Elapsed time: 0.686792 seconds
   

The exit status is set if there is any problem, so you can use echoping to test repeatedly a Web server, to be sure it runs fine (SmokePing does it). Or you can display statistics with MRTG. (see an example of a shell script which runs echoping from MRTG).

To do for a future version: see the TODO file.

Helping and motivating the greedy and selfish developer