I'm trying to find out how one can measure the performance or quality of a
network for gamers and voip-users.
Both applications are very sensitive to packetloss, delays or jitter since
they're using udp instead of tcp and are very timing critical.
==> Which tools (under linux) are you using in order to measure your own
network ore on of your upstreams in terms of "gameability" or voip-usage?
Ordinary pings won't help since routers are regulary dropping them and even
an end-to-end ping is not perfect since one of the hosts might be busy or
something like that?
Starting your favorite online game and play on a server that is being housed
in your own network isn't the solutions I'm looking for
I'm trying to find out how one can measure the performance or quality of a
network for gamers and voip-users.
Both applications are very sensitive to packetloss, delays or jitter since
they're using udp instead of tcp and are very timing critical.
==> Which tools (under linux) are you using in order to measure your own
network ore on of your upstreams in terms of "gameability" or voip-usage?
Ordinary pings won't help since routers are regulary dropping them and even
an end-to-end ping is not perfect since one of the hosts might be busy or
something like that?
Starting your favorite online game and play on a server that is being housed
in your own network isn't the solutions I'm looking for
Your ideas are appreciated
iperf is probably your best bet here, although it needs a client/server config which isnt alway practical.
it might be worth looking at pchar http://www.kitchenlab.org/www/bmah/Software/pchar/
which is pretty in depth if damm slow
I'm trying to find out how one can measure the performance or quality of a
network for gamers and voip-users.
Both applications are very sensitive to packetloss, delays or jitter since
they're using udp instead of tcp and are very timing critical.
==> Which tools (under linux) are you using in order to measure your own
network ore on of your upstreams in terms of "gameability" or voip-usage?
Ordinary pings won't help since routers are regulary dropping them and even
an end-to-end ping is not perfect since one of the hosts might be busy or
something like that?
Starting your favorite online game and play on a server that is being housed
in your own network isn't the solutions I'm looking for
Your ideas are appreciated
iperf is probably your best bet here, although it needs a client/server config which isnt alway practical.
it might be worth looking at pchar Bruce A. Mah: pchar
which is pretty in depth if damm slow
Vince
Gunther
I too am looking for a tool to measure qos metrics for a voip deployment. Whatever this 'something' ends up being, it needs to be highly distributed - colocated with endpoints, do call simulation, provide some reasonable means of centrally collecting the results, and above all cheap, since dense distribution is key. Does such a magical tool exist?
If you are using cisco kit you could use the saa stuff which will simulate calls and provide you with jitter data[1] and knock together a few shell scripts for data collection (or use something like cricket/mrtg)
Ordinary pings won't help since routers are regulary dropping them and even
an end-to-end ping is not perfect since one of the hosts might be busy or
something like that?
I haven't seen anyone mention HPing2. No, it won't solve all of your problems, but you can generate arbitrary UDP packets. You can do a "UDP PING" by setting the destination port to ECHO. You can also do a customized traceroute to test UDP performance of intermediate nodes by playing with TTL. Packet sizes and rates are adjustable too -- don't remember the exact rate limit off the top of my head, but I seem to recall it is something like 10K p/s.
==> Which tools (under linux) are you using in order to measure your
own network ore on of your upstreams in terms of "gameability" or
voip-usage?
My favorite tool for assessing delay distribution and loss over time
is Tobi Oetiker's (of MRTG fame) SmokePing (http://www.smokeping.org/).
As input, it can use various types of measurements - ping RTT/loss
measurement in the simplest case, but also Cisco SAA (now called IP
SLA) measurements, or various other types of probes such as HTTP or
DNS requests.
The nice thing is the way it presents the time distributions
graphically. The graphs also include loss rates. Check out the
"demo" part of Tobi's webpage.
