How to measure network quality&performance for voip&gameservers (udp packetloss, delay, jitter,...)

Tue Mar 7 18:24:33 UTC 2006

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
>