in reply to measuring IN/OUT traffic on your computer

I wrote something similar to this once. Here's the quick one-liner from my bash_history. I'm not sure if it measures the incoming or outgoing traffic on the eth0 device, because it was just a quick one-liner which I don't usually document or even save. It's using the linux proc interface instead of executing ifconfig. 

ruby -we '@s = File.open("/proc/net/dev"); @pq = (); while sleep 20; @
+s.rewind; cq = @s.readlines.find{|l|l=~/^\s*eth0/}.scan(/[^\W:]+/)[9]
+.to_i; ct = Time.now; @pq and printf "%.2f byte/sec\n", (cq-@pq)/Floa
+t(ct-@pt); @pq, @pt = cq, ct; end;'

[download]

By the way, you could also get more detailed statistics by setting up iptables rules because there's a packet and byte counter for each rule.

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Re^2: measuring IN/OUT traffic on your computer
by spx2 (Deacon) on Aug 31, 2007 at 08:35 UTC

    very nice and small

    but does it do graphs with the rates in them ? :P

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      That's easy too. Firstly change the print statement so it would print the time (in epoch seconds) and the rate separated by spaces. Write that output to a file, and then graph that file with gnuplot.

      I actually have a perl program that draws a graph by calling gnuplot, here are a few parts of its code (I did it as a work so I don't want to publish all of it). The part not shown here opens a tempfile and writes into it the numbers in the simple format mentioned above. I also print some overall statistics to stdout. The following sub graphs the data then (it might need some adaptation for your purposes). 

      use File::Temp ();

sub showgraph {
        my($cmdfile, $cmdfilename);
        my $cmds = qq[set key off\nplot "] . quote($outname) . qq[" wi
+th lines\n! echo "Press return to continue"
; read\n];
        ($cmdfile, $cmdfilename) = File::Temp::tempfile undef, "UNLINK
+", 1;
        $out or die "error creating temporary commands file";
        print "Writing gnuplot command to temporary file $cmdfilename\
+n";
        print $cmdfile $cmds or
                die "error writing command file: $!";
        flush $cmdfile or die
                "error flushing comand file";
        print "Launching gnuplot\n";
        system "gnuplot", $cmdfilename;
        close $cmdfile;
}

      [download]

      Update 2008-01-29: see Plot a spiral with gnuplot.

[reply]
[d/l]

        I like it.

        On Linux you can use the tools nload or ipfraf for this... But anyway - short and definitely a cool use of Perl.

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In Section Cool Uses for Perl