Dave,
There is quite a bit of information you can glean from looking at the
arrival time
of packets, and round trip times. A just sit down with a laptop and test
experience
that lasts 30 seconds is almost completely worthless - as it does not
tell you how the
link is doing at any other time.
I will quote a story from some years ago that happened to me - I may
have written it here before,
but it is too good not to use again.
A customer rang up and complained that his voice over the internet
implementation (that used my software)
had substandard audio quality. Connected to his network, measured link
quality with ping and scp and so on.
All ping times were good, file copies site to site were good. Of course,
I was connected at nighttime so that my
heavy testing did not interfere with his daytime usage. It was the usual
finger pointing game. Then I added
link testing (record ping times and drop rate) for all links my software
ran on. This data was graphed using javascript.
Beautiful. Turned out the guy had switched from cable link (which are
high quality) to a wireless internet service
provider. The wireless links were being flooded with data from all over
and packets were going missing. With the graphs,
we showed him that our software was fine - he was experiencing high
packet loss on the network.
The basic first step is to record different performance metrics of the
link over a 24 hour period.
1)Test dns lookup of different sites. Does that always work? Every 30
seconds a test should run
2)ping to remote host - how reliable is it?
3)Telecom are offering unlimited home data plan (There was a comment
about someone in the
states with an unlimited plan and doing 35T a month. Sheesh)
The interesting part of telecom's plan is that they may shape your
traffic (limit it) during the evening.
Which tells me that the peak time for network usage is in the
evening. Thus, measurements night
time and day time should be different, if it is a shaping/network
load thing.
Are the night time and day time measurements different?
4)Automated tests to download data from a remote site - what is the
measured speed? and how does it vary over a 24 hour period?
5)It is almost certain that your ISP (internet service provider) is
traffic shaping your data. You can verify this with
a number of open source projects to determne if shaping is
happening, and how extreme it is. One could use such tools
to plot the level of shaping they apply, and how brutal it is over a
24 hour period.
6)Finally, does your router have a web access page with logs on it? If
so, do they tell you anything?
Cheers,
Derek.
On 17/06/14 07:42, dave lilley wrote:
anyone here able to suggest anyway of testing number of
users connected to a line?
Mate who lives in Downs Rd South eyreton commented to me
about his link going down and he thinks too many people are
on it up stream.
mate says he spoke to the provider (not sure who it is) but
think they claimed the link was ok, I was hoping to nip out
using a linux lappie and test the line for some more solid
answers, They use an apple ipad and an oldish PC.
thanks for tips of many.
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