High-Capacity Bandwidth Testing Software? 32
An anonymous reader asks: "I work for an ISP which specializes in high bandwidth (100+ megabit) fiber-based delivery solutions. As with any other ISP we sometimes have to perform troubleshooting with customers who are reporting slow throughput. We currently have a home-grown bandwidth testing server in order to point-to-point test the throughput across our own network. Unfortunately (fortunately), customers have begun purchasing amounts of bandwidth that are capable of exceeding our testing capacity. Given a multi-gigabit network infrastructure and an on-net server with a gigabit Ethernet port, what software packages are available which can reliably test throughput approaching one gigabit? Cross-browser compatibility and 'click-here-to-test' usability should be considerations."
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
You need a fast computer with a large hard-disk and a gigabit ethernet card, tcpdump, a shell, and 12000 monkeys to read the logs.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
1) Process speed
2) I/O reads and writes
3) OS (swapping)
Look towards a dedicate unit (test head) with remote capabilities.
DISCLAIMER: I work in the Telecom Industry.
Ok, the usability isn't great (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
This one:
"but facts don't change themselves to suit a like"
I could not find "a Goggle" for it, so thanx for a great line.
Re: (Score:2)
Really easy (Score:5, Funny)
Network Performance Toolkit (Score:3, Interesting)
I've not tried to push a full gig with them (yet), but they seem to work better than anything else I've found so far...
http://e2epi.internet2.edu/network-performance-to
Cheap, easy solution... (Score:1, Funny)
Clicking on an infected email attachment should saturate the bandwidth and test the infrastructure thoroughly. Cleaning up the post-testing mess can be painful.
TPTest (Score:5, Informative)
You want .. Iperf (Score:3, Informative)
http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ [nlanr.net]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/Iperf/ [sourceforge.net]
Very configurable, and if u want GUI or network tuning.. read the FAQ, they give suggestions.
TPTest works nicely (Score:2, Interesting)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tptest/ [sourceforge.net]
It's a great tool that many of the ISP's in Sweden asks there customers to use before reporting in bad *DSL bandwidth.
Spirent - Smartbits & Avalanche (Score:5, Informative)
The main game in town is Spirent [spirentcom.com].
In the IPS & firewall testing world, they're what everyone uses, but even in lots of load balancing applications etc they're what people use.
There are a few software solutions around that do an ok job, but very few that can do much at decent speed (ie > 400Mbit). I have a pretty crack team of devs, and using hand tuned open source, and home-spun apps, we got by for a few years, but should have given in years earlier and just got a set of Spirent gear. You'll save time.
Their Smartbits line are basically hardware based packet generators, able to blast away for a variety of scenarios.
Their Avalanche line are hardware based full session generators, so you can re-create a web server being hammered by thousands of clients. I just signed a cheque for > $100k for a single pair of avalanche boxes however, so bring your cash box...
You'll probably find Spirent's hw based solutions frustrating, but if you work with others doing similar work they're very widely used, and you can exchange scripts etc..
There is an Irish company that was moving in to this space, and had an ok product, but it was a bit immature when I last tried it. Sorry, but their name escapes me- google should know.
--Q
Re: (Score:1)
http://www.ixiacom.com/ [ixiacom.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Most of those vendors also offer some sort of portable unit and one-way latency tests. One-way latency is hard, to measure latency you need a transmit time and a receive time so you need the same timing reference at two locations. The vendors accomplis
Hardware (Score:3, Informative)
I know! (Score:1)
Ping!
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
Half Life! (Score:2, Funny)
Oy! Maybe my job does rock.
Da Fluke network tester (a $6000 Gameboy wannabe) was broken today since someone took the lithium batteries out of it and neglected to put them back in the case.
We had to test out the connection between floors 2&4, going through floor 3 in the process.
so I tell da b0ss that the Network tester is dead... And I need to generate network traffic so I can see the stats on the switches and routers, make sure no packets are being killed prematurely.
you aren't going to do it with one browser (Score:2)
your best bet IMO if you don't want to give the customers any special kit is to host a largeish file on a powerfull server with a good server class PCI-X or PCI-E gigabit ethernet card. Then get them to download it from multiple machines at once. You can then measure the traffic going out of the server (either with software on the server or with your existing infrastructure equipment).
ixia Qtest (Score:2)
What Qtest does is let you set up a test server at each end of a pipe. Then you can run tests betw
Netperf (Score:4, Informative)
Do background research first (Shameless plug)! (Score:2)
As a start, read this paper:
The Spectrum of Internet Performance
http://en.scientifi [scientificcommons.org]