do stdout output with specific speed

Question

For a load test of my application (under Linux), I'm looking for a tool that outputs data on stdout at a specific rate (like 100 bytes/s), so that I can pipe the output to netcat which sends it to my application. Some option for dd would be ideal, but I didn't find anything so far. It doesn't really matter what kind of data is printed (NUL bytes are OK). Any hints?

Answer 1

If you're fine with getting all hundred bytes at a time, you could do a loop with sleep and plain old echo in the shell as a first attempt at least.

Answer 2

Well, I'm now using nuttcp to do "real" load tests instead. It seems to have quite low overhead, so the test system is not too much disturbed.

Answer 3

I wrote a quick program that takes one argument, how many A characters to print to standard output per second (negative argument means no rate limiting). Hope this helps! :-) (On GNU libc, you will need to link your program with -lrt.)

Edit: revised to print dot by default, unless a second argument is specified, in which case the first character of that is used. (And that means, if you want to print the NUL character, just specify an empty string as the second argument. :-))

#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int
sleeptill(const struct timespec *when)
{
    struct timespec now, diff;

    clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &now);
    diff.tv_sec = when->tv_sec - now.tv_sec;
    diff.tv_nsec = when->tv_nsec - now.tv_nsec;
    while (diff.tv_nsec < 0) {
        diff.tv_nsec += 1000000000;
        --diff.tv_sec;
    }
    if (diff.tv_sec < 0)
        return 0;
    return nanosleep(&diff, 0);
}

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    double rate = 0.0;
    char *endp;
    struct timespec start;
    double offset;

    if (argc >= 2) {
        rate = strtod(argv[1], &endp);
        if (endp == argv[1] || *endp)
            rate = 0.0;
        else
            rate = 1 / rate;

        if (!argv[2])
            argv[2] = ".";
    }

    if (!rate) {
        fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s rate [char]\n", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }

    clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &start);
    offset = start.tv_nsec / 1000000000.0;

    while (1) {
        struct timespec till = start;
        double frac;
        double whole;

        frac = modf(offset += rate, &whole);
        till.tv_sec += whole;
        till.tv_nsec = frac * 1000000000.0;
        sleeptill(&till);
        write(STDOUT_FILENO, argv[2], 1);
    }
}