Measure pipe throughput in the shell

Question

There is a shell command that allows you to measure how fast the data goes through it, so you can measure the speed of output of commands in a pipe. So instead of:

$ somecommand | anothercommand

you can do something like:

$ somecommand | ??? | anothercommand

And throughput stats (bytes/sec) are printed to stderr, I think. But I can't for the life of me remember what that command was.

score 59 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

59

cpipe is probably better for these purposes, but another related program is pv (Pipe Viewer):

Screenshot of pv from the pv homepage

If you give it the --rate flag it will show the transfer rate

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

Community

1

answered Sep 03 '10 at 06:34

Michael Mrozek

93,103
40
240
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score 20 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 03 '10 at 06:12

20

You need a utility called cpipe.

Usage:

tar cCf / - usr | cpipe -vr -vw -vt > /dev/null

Output:

...
  in:  19.541ms at    6.4MB/s (   4.7MB/s avg)    2.0MB
 out:   0.004ms at   30.5GB/s (  27.1GB/s avg)    2.0MB
thru:  19.865ms at    6.3MB/s (   4.6MB/s avg)    2.0MB
...

answered Sep 03 '10 at 06:12

hobodave

1,193

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No longer found any valid reference to cpipe... but pv is equivalent. – Yves Martin Jan 07 '15 at 08:26
1

Is there a similar command for windows, or is there any pv that is windows compatible ? – Radon8472 Oct 27 '20 at 22:36

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 28 '17 at 20:23

As seen at https://askubuntu.com/a/620234, notice that pv, at least, can slow down your throughput significantly. The article linked to covers dd, but the point is that pv can slow down your stuff. If you care, and if you are transferring terabytes of data for example.

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Oct 13 '16 at 21:09

2

If you have Python 2 or 3 and pip (sudo apt-get install python-pip) you can install tqdm:

    python -m pip install tqdm

Then simply:

    somecommand | tqdm | anothercommand

If you need help, run tqdm --help. It has a lot of options. Feel free to read more and make suggestions at https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm

edited Oct 13 '16 at 21:09

gaborous

145

answered Oct 13 '16 at 15:10

casper.dcl

151

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 07 '15 at 08:32

A new tool is now available to inspect already running processes files access, display progress and throughput estimation: https://github.com/Xfennec/cv

If your somecommand or anothercommand are already known by cv, it is just as easy to use as watch cv -wq, or else you have to use -c option to monitor specifically your processes.

Measure pipe throughput in the shell

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