Cbench (New)

Cbench

Cbench (controller benchmarker) is a program for testing OpenFlow controllers by generating packet-in events for new flows. Cbench emulates a bunch of switches which connect to a controller, send packet-in messages, and watch for flow-mods to get pushed down. If you think a change you are making may have a performance impact, it can be helpful to use cbench to measure it.

Installing cbench

Please refer to http://www.openflow.org/wk/images/3/3e/Manual.pdf Chapter 2 for detailed installation instructions.

Under debian/ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool libsnmp-dev libpcap-dev
$ git clone git://gitosis.stanford.edu/oflops.git
$ cd oflops; git submodule init && git submodule update
$ git clone git://gitosis.stanford.edu/openflow.git
$ cd openflow; git checkout -b release/1.0.0 remotes/origin/release/1.0.0
$ wget http://hyperrealm.com/libconfig/libconfig-1.4.9.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf libconfig-1.4.9.tar.gz
$ cd libconfig-1.4.9
$ ./configure
$ sudo make && sudo make install
$ cd ../../netfpga-packet-generator-c-library/
$ sudo ./autogen.sh && sudo ./configure && sudo make
$ cd ..
$ sh ./boot.sh ; ./configure --with-openflow-src-dir=<absolute path to openflow branch>; make
$ sudo make install
$ cd cbench

You should now be able to run cbench.

Running cbench

Cbench has a number of arguments. The interesting ones for us are:

M	number of MACs / hosts to emulate per switch
s	number of switches to emulate
t	throughput (vs. latency mode)

A useful example:

./cbench -c localhost -p 6633 -m 10000 -l 10 -s 16 -M 1000 -t