Generate several megabytes of of random data in C#

Question

I'd like to know a good way to generate several megabytes of random data using C# on Windows (using .NET 2.0 for deployment, but other approaches using other options such as .NET 3.0 and Mono libraries would also be of some interest).

The purpose of the data is to transmit over a network connection, to evaluate real world network throughput to fixed destinations, so the level of randomness is not really significant - though the data itself should not be something trivially compressible (such as simple series of repeating characters).

I can use Random, or generate GUID's but I'm curious to know if there are better ways of doing this. Is there something analogous to /dev/urandom on UNIX for example?

Answer 1

You can use this approach to generate random numbers stream:

int streamSize = (1024 * 1024) * 15; // Let's make 15 Mbytes of junk

int left = streamSize;

while (left > 0)
{
    RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider ();
    byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
    rng.GetBytes (buffer);

    SendBytes (buffer); // Send it to network interface

    left -= 1024;
}

Answer 2

Developer Art's suggestion is good for getting pretty random data - but in real life the data may well not be completely random. I appreciate that it shouldn't be trivially compressible - but do you really want it to be completely non-compressible?

Real world network data consists of a variety of types of traffic - some will be compressible, some won't.

To my mind, the best way of getting realistic data is to sample it from the real world. What kind of traffic will you be getting in real life? Are you able to sample it from real users - potentially a variety of different users?