Many organizations are looking to switch their high-speed messaging from TCP to Multicast. This can drastically improve their performance in streaming data applications, such as live market data, where you have many subscriber programs. However, many corporate network infrastructures provide limited multicast connectivity or are not able to sustain high message rates. Even sites that are successfully using multicast with legacy messaging systems encounter problems after an upgrade to a higher-performing messaging layer.Fortunately, most modern networking hardware is capable of passing wire-speed multicast with appropriate configuration parameters. The key is discovering configuration problems early and diagnosing them. The "msend", "mdump", and "mpong" tools can help. You can use them to evaluate your network's capacity to carry multicast traffic. Warning : If used carelessly, the msend tool can produce significant network loading and congestion, to the point of rendering switches and routers virtually non-functional. When using large burst counts (-b>500) and/or small pause times (-p<100), make sure to keep the number of bursts (-n) small enough to limit the duration of the test to a few seconds. Note:

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