Home

ANT: A Network (Performance) Tester

ANT is a framework to facilitate the exchange of unstructured data streams across a TCP/IP port, including support for multiple simultaneous client connections.

Small data streams need only a single "chunk", but large data streams are de-composed into numerous smaller chunks.

ANT includes timing information on each HEADER/FOOTER of each chunk, which allows the ANT protocol to also be used for performance monitoring of its data exchanges (with nanosecond resolution, as supported by the host platform).

By using localhost, ANT can be used to monitor performance of main memory access (where you'll observe SEND/RECV rates that far exceed the host network infrastructure; such as 900MB/sec on what should be a 125MB/sec gigabit connection; but which the OS can bypass the NIC drivers and infrastructure when using localhost).

ANT is a formal client/server protocol, to which additional client command requests can be added. For example, a command might be a request for elevation or wind data within a specified region. Such bulk data may be impractical to transmit in more structured formats like XML.