On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 2:00 PM Chris Gross <cgr...@ninestarconnect.com> wrote:
> I'm curious what people here have found as a good standard for providing > solid speedtest results to customers. All our techs have Dell laptops of > various models, but we always hit 100% CPU when doing a Ookla speedtest for > a server we have on site. So then if you have a customer paying for 600M or > 1000M symmetric, they get mad and demand you prove it's full speed. At that > point we have to roll out different people with JDSU's to test and prove > it's functional where a Ookla result would substitute fine if we didn't > have crummy laptops possibly. Even though from what I can see on some > google results, we exceed the standards several providers call for. > > Most of these complaints come from the typical "power" internet user of > course that never actually uses more than 50M sustained paying for a > residential connection, so running a circuit test on each turn up is > uncalled for. > > Anyone have any suggestions of the requirements (CPU/RAM/etc) for a laptop > that can actually do symmetric gig, a rugged small inexpensive device we > can roll with instead to prove, or any other weird solution involving > ritual sacrifice that isn't too offensive to the eyes? > My practice is to use iperf with packet capture on both sides. The packet capture can then be analyzed for accurate per-second, or less, throughput, re-transmit rates, etc. This was implemented in a corporate network in several ways including dedicated servers (that also did other monitoring), and bootable CDs or USB sticks that a user in a small office could run on a standard desktop. Many interesting issues were discovered with this technique, and a fair number of perceived issues were debunked. Here is a wrapper to run iperf + tcpdump on each side of a connection (it could use some automation): https://github.com/meekj/perl-packet-tools/blob/master/run_iperf I originally did the analysis in Perl, but that can be fairly slow when processing 30 seconds of packets on a saturated GigE link. If anyone is interested there is now a C++ version along with analysis code in R at: https://github.com/meekj/iperfsum That version currently has only one second resolution. I have a R interface to libpcap files that could be used for analysis at any time resolution: https://github.com/meekj/libpcapR I have a plan to implement the complete test environment in a Docker container at some point. I also have a collection of small, mostly low-cost, computers that I plan to benchmark for network throughput and data analysis time. Some of the tiny computers can saturate a GigE link but are very slow processing the data. Jon