RFC 1030 (rfc1030) - Page 2 of 16
On testing the NETBLT Protocol over divers networks
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1030 Testing the NETBLT Protocol November 1987 helped monitor it during testing. 3. Implementations and Test Programs This section briefly describes the NETBLT implementations and test programs used in the testing. Currently, NETBLT runs on three machine types: Symbolics LISP machines, IBM PC/ATs, and SUN-3s. The test results described in this paper were gathered using the IBM PC/AT and SUN-3 NETBLT implementations. The IBM and SUN implementations are very similar; most differences lie in timer and multi-tasking library implementations. The SUN NETBLT implementation uses UNIX's user-accessible raw IP socket; it is not implemented in the UNIX kernel. The test application performs a simple memory-to-memory transfer of an arbitrary amount of data. All data are actually allocated by the application, given to the protocol layer, and copied into NETBLT packets. The results are therefore fairly realistic and, with appropriately large amounts of buffering, could be attained by disk- based applications as well. The test application provides several parameters that can be varied to alter NETBLT's performance characteristics. The most important of these parameters are: burst interval The number of milliseconds from the start of one burst transmission to the start of the next burst transmission. burst size The number of packets transmitted per burst. buffer size The number of bytes in a NETBLT buffer (all buffers must be the same size, save the last, which can be any size required to complete the transfer). data packet size The number of bytes contained in a NETBLT DATA packet's data segment. number of outstanding buffers The number of buffers which can be in transmission/error recovery at any given moment. M. Lambert
