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

Tue Mar 7 18:53:40 UTC 2006

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Justin Church wrote:

> Vince Hoffman wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 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
>
> I too am looking for a tool to measure qos metrics for a voip deployment. 
> Whatever this 'something' ends up being, it needs to be highly distributed - 
> colocated with endpoints, do call simulation, provide some reasonable means 
> of centrally collecting the results, and above all cheap, since dense 
> distribution is key.  Does such a magical tool exist?
>
If you are using cisco kit you could use the saa stuff which will 
simulate calls and provide you with jitter data[1] and knock 
together a few shell scripts for data collection (or use something like 
cricket/mrtg)

Vince
[1] http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/126/saa.html

> -jc
>