For a load test of my application (under Linux), I'm looking for a tool that outputs data on stdout at a specific rate (like 100 bytes/s), so that I can pipe the output to netcat which sends it to my application. Some option for dd would be ideal, but I didn't find anything so far. It doesn't really matter what kind of data is printed (NUL bytes are OK). Any hints?
I think that this is what you really want: Pipe Viewer
Using <fast input> | pv -qL <rate>[k|m|g|t] | <rate-limited output> will limit the pipe to the requested rate.