Hi everybody,

I am writing a simple program in C that compares the performances of various sockets bound to different interfaces and then decide what is the best interface to use in a certain moment, for a certain destination address. This application (let's call it A) will execute while another application (B) is using these sockets (e.g. for streaming).

I thought that the throughput might be the best indicator of performance, but I can't find a method to get the throughput of a socket (which is receiving data, and not sending) in C.

Also, this application can directly take information from the kernel using a /proc file, so I can use all informations inside struct sock and struct tcp_sock.

The important thing is that I cannot send packets in order to calculate this, but only use the already ongoing traffic.

Can someone help me?

Thanks

I am a little unclear on your goal but if you wish to monitor all of the sockets the netstat utility is useful for viewing your open socket connections.

netstat -a to see all connections

You will notice a very large amount of data concerning the sockets activity and a little read using man netstat would be most effective. So you don't actually have to write any code to see this as it has already been done for you.

I reread your post and there is a way to just use C to get the same information as netstat.

FILE *fp; /* FILE stream for popen */
char *cmdstring = "netstat -a";
char buf[BUFSZ]; /* Buffer for input */
/*
Create the pipe
*/
if((fp = popen(cmdstring, "r")) == NULL) err_quit("popen");
/*
Read cmdstring's output
*/
while((fgets(buf,BUFSZ, fp)) != NULL)
printf("%s", buf);
/*
Close and reap the exit status
*/
pclose(fp);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);

stolen quite handily from Kurt Wall

Hi,

thanks for the reply, but netstat doesn't provide informations on the throughput of the sockets.
I read the man and it seems that there is nothing like bit/s for every tcp socket.