Proving Gig Speed

Mon Jul 16 20:34:17 UTC 2018

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 2:00 PM Chris Gross <CGross at 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