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Measuring the performance of a gigabit router is not
a simple task. The only effective method of measuring
the performance is by exercising both the data forwarding
performance concurrent with the control plane stress.
To measure the performance of a router with a 40 Gb/s
switching capacity, 40 Gb/s of test traffic must be
generated into the router. A 40 Gb/s router is capable
of handling traffic delivered over interfaces up to
16 OC-48c (2.4 Gb/s). Each physical interface must deliver
many streams of instrumented test traffic -- each stream
representing an aggregate of traffic flows typical of
the Internet. The performance of the router is measured
by observing the effect on each instrumented stream
of traffic.
This application note describes the motivation for
performance testing, and lists a series of steps that
should be taken in order to measure the performance
of a router.
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Network Services 
