How to measure network quality&performance for voip&gameservers (udp packetloss, delay, jitter,...)
Hello colleages, 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 :-) Gunther
On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
Hello colleages,
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 ;) Vince
Gunther
Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
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. Jon Kibler -- Jon R. Kibler Chief Technical Officer A.S.E.T., Inc. Charleston, SC USA (843) 849-8214 ================================================== Filtered by: TRUSTEM.COM's Email Filtering Service http://www.trustem.com/ No Spam. No Viruses. Just Good Clean Email.
Gunther Stammwitz writes:
==> 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. -- Simon.
participants (4)
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Gunther Stammwitz -
Jon R. Kibler -
Simon Leinen -
Vince Hoffman