Taken from the dbench README file: Netbench is a terrible benchmark, but it's an "industry standard" and it's what is used in the press to rate windows fileservers like Samba and WindowsNT. In order for the development methodologies of the open source community to work we need to be able to run this benchmark in an environment that a bunch of us have access to. We need the source to the benchmark so we can see what it does. We need to be able to split it into pieces to look for individual bottlenecks. In short, we need to open up netbench to the masses. To do this I have written three tools, dbench, tbench and smbtorture. All three read a load description file called client.txt that was derived from a network sniffer dump of a real netbench run. client.txt is about 4MB and describes the 90 thousand operations that a netbench client does in a typical netbench run. They parse client.txt and use it to produce the same load without having to buy a huge lab. They can simulate any number of simultaneous clients.