monitoring bandwidth on linux system

[webstar]

Monitoring Bandwidth on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
It is difficult to directly monitor bandwidth utilization. However, by examining device-level
statistics, it is possible to roughly gauge whether insufficient
bandwidth is an issue on your system.
By using vmstat, it is possible to determine if overall device activity
is excessive by examining the bi and bo fields; in addition, taking
note of the si and so fields give you a bit more insight into how much
disk activity is due to swap-related I/O:
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$ vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu------
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
0 0 35756 8444 9656 88576 0 1 34 10 515 471 5 1 94 0 0
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[peterdoown]

In the computer network bandwidth data transfer rate is supported by a network connection or interface. One of the most commonly expressed in terms of bandwidth bits per second (bps). The word comes from the electrical engineering field, where the distance between the representatives of the total bandwidth or range of maximum and minimum signals in the communication channel (band). Bandwidth refers to carrying out the connection. Capacity, the more likely will follow the higher performance, but the overall performance also depends on other factors such as delay.