The networking subsystems of any operating system have grown in complexity as the set of protocols and features supported has grown since the birth of the Internet. Firewalls, Virtual Private Networking, and IPv6 are just a few of the features present in the FreeBSD kernel that were not even envisioned when the original BSD releases were developed over 30 years ago. Advances in networking hardware, with 10Gbps NIC cards being available for only a few hundred dollars, have far outstripped the speeds for which the kernel’s network software was originally written. As with the increasing speed of processors over the last 30 years, systems developers and integrators have always depended on the next generation of hardware to solve the current generation’s performance bottlenecks, often without resorting to any coherent form of measurement. Our paper shows developers and systems integrators at all proficiency levels how to benchmark networking systems, with specific examples drawn from our experiences with the FreeBSD kernel. Common pitfalls are called out and addressed and a set of representative tests are given. A secondary outcome of this work is a simple system for network test coordination, Conductor, which is also described.