John, Check out Inverse Network Technology. http://www.inversenet.com -scott
From owner-nanog@merit.edu Mon Dec 1 15:15 EST 1997 Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 14:50:29 -0500 (EST) From: John R Levine <johnl@iecc.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: User-level ISP performance measurement MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu Content-Type> : > TEXT/PLAIN> ; > charset=US-ASCII> Content-Length: 1422
I hope I'm not reopening a huge can of worms here, but ...
Some of my relatives have started a small ISP in western Vermont. (They already run the local telco.) They're wondering how to compare the performance that their users see to the ISPs in the adjacent town. I told them that there isn't anything published that'll be of much use, since the stuff I've seen tries to measure backbone performance and for the most part does so ineptly.
For user level stuff, it seems to me that you could pick a representative set of actions (visit large and small web sites, download e-mail, scan newsgroups), dial in via PPP every hour for a week being sure to flush out caches and otherwise start from a consistent user state, do the actions, time them all, and make some simple stats. This would be miserable to do manually, but pretty straightforward to do automatically. Is there anything available, either as a product or service, that does this sort of analysis?
One of the other hats I wear is as a director of a software testing tools company, and we could certainly whip up this kind of stuff in no time using our existing products if there were a demand for it.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47