The response of a single-mode fiber to a sinusoidally modulated input has been studied to see its utility in measuring system performance in the presence of fiber nonlinearities. The sinusoidally modulated signal models an alternating bit sequence of ones and zeros in on-off keying. The sinusoidal response of normally dispersive fiber shows a strong correlation with eye-opening penalty (EOP) over a wide range of the nonlinearity parameter N (0.1 ＜ N$^2$＜ 100). This result implies that the measurement of the sinusoidal response can be an alternate way of measuring EOP without having a long sequence of randomly modulated input bits. But in the anomalous dispersion region, the sinusoidal response has a much more limited range of application to estimate system performance.