8 replies to this topic

[MikeDVB]

I've been looking for some sort of tool or utility to benchmark my wifi network but I've not come up with anything. We switched from a 2.4 GHz network to a 5 GHz network and the adapter and base station state that we can use up to 300 MBPS but I want to see what the *real world* performance is while doing my best to avoid other bottlenecks such as hard disk I/O, etc...

Does anybody know of any good Wifi benchmarking utilities?

[username]

iperf would probably work, it's not specific to wireless, but I don't see why it would need to be. Can test udp/tcp, throughput, loss, etc. TCP has all sorts of weird throttling and buffering conditions so UDP might be easier, just keep ramping up the rates until you start getting massive packet loss I guess. Although most things that would be transfering via LAN will probably be using TCP anyways so maybe thats a better real world test.
I'm sure you can figure it out yourself, but heres a bit of a tutorial
http://openmaniak.com/iperf.php

[fshagan]

SmallNetBuilder uses a commercial product now, but used to use QCheck a free utility from IxChariot. They describe the way they used it back in 2003 HERE and what they do now HERE (with the commercial product).

[MikeDVB]

I'm seeing a lot of tools but most of them are fairly complicated. Essentially all I want to do is blast X MBPS traffic to IP Y over TCP or UDP and then measure how much traffic actually makes it through versus what is sent

[fshagan]

I'm seeing a lot of tools but most of them are fairly complicated. Essentially all I want to do is blast X MBPS traffic to IP Y over TCP or UDP and then measure how much traffic actually makes it through versus what is sent

QCheck would do the throughput test, but I can't get it to install on Win7. And its not something I'm willing to pay for to troubleshoot the laptop performance. It's my wife's, and she wouldn't be impressed with numbers anyway. My most recent bout of troubleshooting for her was to resolve her "home page being cluttered", which I took to mean a browser hijacker had changed her home page. She was talking about her desktop.

[Brian Stevenson]

I'm seeing a lot of tools but most of them are fairly complicated. Essentially all I want to do is blast X MBPS traffic to IP Y over TCP or UDP and then measure how much traffic actually makes it through versus what is sent

Assuming you access to *nix-based boxes, this solution should work for you:
http://serverfault.c...two-points/5119

1. Listen and pipe to /dev/null on one machine

nc –l –p 7000 | /dev/null

2. Connect and pipe 100MiB of random data on the other

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=100 | nc 192.168.1.120 7000 –q 10

2 (alt). For realtime stats use pipeviewer

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=100 | pv | nc 192.168.1.120 7000 -q 10

[MikeDVB]

It's a MacBook Pro (mid 2010 edition), AirPort Express (Dual Band, Gigabit), and then the other system I'd be connecting to is Windows7. I can run many of the Linux utilities on the Mac and I can toss a different disk (just for convenience) into the Windows 7 machine and boot it up into Linux or I could use a LiveCD

[Brian Stevenson]

It's a MacBook Pro (mid 2010 edition), AirPort Express (Dual Band, Gigabit), and then the other system I'd be connecting to is Windows7. I can run many of the Linux utilities on the Mac and I can toss a different disk (just for convenience) into the Windows 7 machine and boot it up into Linux or I could use a LiveCD

The pv tool is pretty slick! You'll likely need to yum/apt-get it for linux or use homebrew to install it for mac.
http://www.ivarch.co...ograms/pv.shtml

The dd command might need to be tweaked with different bs (block size) and count depending on how much junk you need to send across the wire.

Whatever option you choose, I would be interested in the results.

Peace,
Brian

[MikeDVB]

I'm wanting to benchmark my 5 GHz network versus my 2.4 GHz network to see how much of an improvement having an uncluttered airway is which is ultimately my goal