StarWind rPerf free tool

StarWind rPerf is a free tool by StarWind used to measure latency and throughput on RDMA connections between different systems and OSs (Windows/Linux).

rPerf is a CLI-based tool and can be used on Windows systems (Windows 7 or later, Windows Server 2012 or later) and the NIC must be configured with Network Direct Provider v1 and lossless RDMA. The tool supports also some Linux distributions (CentOS and Ubuntu) and the used network drives must support RDMA and RoCE.

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)

RDMA is a technology that allows network-connected computers to exchange data in RAM without involving the processor, cache or operating system. Data can be read from the RAM of one computer and directly written to the RAM of another computer.

This solution allows to free resources improving throughput and performance with a low-latency data transfer.

RDMA can be applied to networking and storage applications.

StarWind rPerf tool

The rPerf tool can be downloaded from StarWind website and copied to any folder of your computer. The command line options and usage examples can be found in the dedicated RDMA Performance Benchmarking Tool page.

For example, you can measure the RDMA connection between two Windows and Linux servers connected directly over RDMA.

In the Windows Server command prompt, run the following command (image from StarWind website):

C:\> nd_rperf.exe -c -a 10.1.2.12 -C 10000 -S 4096 -q 16 -o R

This example shows the test result performing 10.000 read iterations with 4096 size of the buffer and queue depth of 16.

StarWind rPerf doesn't require any additional software to run and it's very simple to deploy. The software can be download as free tool from StarWind website.