Measure local sockets speed?

Question

How to measure the speed of data exchange via AF_UNIX sockets? Is it possible to write some two bash scripts:

• First creates the socket, bind the socket to the local address, accept the connection and receive all data to /dev/null.
• The second one creates the socket, establish the connection with the already opened socket and spawn some device in /dev so it will be possible to measure the speed with dd command?

Answer 1

You can use netcat -U to easily communicate over unix domain sockets. The pv command comes in handy when you want to know the speed at which data is moving through a pipe.

receiver:

nc -lU /tmp/socket > /dev/null

sender:

pv /dev/zero | nc -U /tmp/socket

In general, unix sockets are really fast. This clocked in at 170 MB/s on my old laptop, and 400 MB/s on my somewhat newer desktop.