Reading Interface Speed

A : On Linux:

$ ethtool eth0 
    Speed: 1000Mb/s

Not what I want at all,

Q How do I get interface throughput

A iftop does what top does for network interfaces:

$ iftop
interface: em0
IP address is: 192.168.204.4
MAC address is: ffffffec:ffffffb1:ffffffd7:34:ffffffa3:ffffffa1
pcap_open_live(em0): em0: You don't have permission to capture on that device ((cannot open device) /dev/bpf: Permission denied)

Annoying

$ sudo iftop
...cool ncurses display...

A Besides iftop and iptraf, also check: bwm-ng

$ bwm-ng 
...cool ncurses display...

Not scriptable

$ bwm-ng --output csv
1479982871;em0;0.00;0.00;0.00;0;0;0.00;0.00;0.00;0;0;0.00;0.00;0;0
1479982871;lo0;0.00;0.00;0.00;0;0;0.00;0.00;0.00;0;0;0.00;0.00;0;0
1479982871;total;0.00;0.00;0.00;0;0;0.00;0.00;0.00;0;0;0.00;0.00;0;0

Q How do those commands gather their data?

A It is different everywhere

Getting a look a network rates is really easy on FreeBSD, the systat tool in ifstat ships with the base system. But if you want to do this programmatically there isn't a lot of information out there, I had to read source code to figure out how to do it.

The initial iftop error message indicates they are doing a capture of all the traffic on all interfaces and working this stuff out on their own. That requires root and I really don't want the hassle of doing it, surely the OS is capturing these stats from the network stack?

On Linux, these stats are exposed via /proc :

/sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/rx_bytes
/sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/tx_bytes

There may actually be other interfaces for Linux, but I don't think it is worth digging any further.

On FreeBSD you can do what systat does and use a sysctl call to populate a struct. The bwm-ng man page has a heap of methods for finding these numbers on different platforms, for the BSD's and MacOS it suggests the getifaddrs interface.

For portable code not written in C I will probably set up a thread running bwm-ng outputting csv data.

Reading: Cibola Burn, Excession