G+_610GARAGE Posted July 12, 2015 Share Posted July 12, 2015 I am setting up a raspberry pi as a thin client and was wondering how I test for network quality. I am trying to optimize the pi and want to know if what I have done actually worked or not. I'm thinking I would need to test latency, speed, and packet loss. Also, I am only dealing with my internal network. Any suggestions? P.S. Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ This may make an interesting segment, testing network quality. Update, I should have add this: I have raspberry pi running rdesktop on raspbian. Rdesktop is connecting to a vmserver on the same network using rdp. Network topology is super simple. Passing though only a switch (maybe two). I am trying an external usb ethernet adapter, and it seemed to improve performance. I also tried tweaking settings with the network stack which also seemed to help. But I want some hard data instead of gut feeling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Reese Posted July 12, 2015 Share Posted July 12, 2015 A ping test is by far the simplest, but that doesn't really test for bandwidth or throughput. Ping could tell you latency, but I'd expect the bandwidth to be sufficient until it's not lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted July 13, 2015 Share Posted July 13, 2015 Let us know a bit more about your setup 610bob and maybe we can get more specific on the advice, but it certainly shouldn't be impossible! Here's "a few" ideas >_> Ben Reese is right! Ping is a good tool that will give you part of the answer. Obviously, it gives you latency, but it'll also let you know if it's packets are being dropped. If you're passing data through a router, anything with decent software (read: not provided by your ISP) should give you some network monitoring tools. Things like OpenWRT or PFSense are perfectly capable of showing you a pretty graph of current data speeds. If you're looking for a less cheap solution, go with a network tap. These essentially pass the data to both the source and your monitoring box (probably running snort or at least something with a pretty GUI). Both microsoft and linux have tools (like performance monitor) to give you a near real-time graph of network throughput as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_610GARAGE Posted July 13, 2015 Author Share Posted July 13, 2015 John Mink Basicly, what I am doing is having a raspberry pi running rdesktop on raspbian. Rdesktop is connecting to a vmserver on the same network using rdp. Network topology is super simple. Passing though only a switch (maybe two). I am trying an external usb ethernet adapter, and it seemed to improve performance. I also tried tweaking settings with the network stack which also seemed to help. But I want some hard data instead of gut feeling. Thanks for the ping suggestion. I was going to right that ping just says that time was <1, but that's windows. I just tried it on my pi and it gives me actual time. I feel a little stupid now. :) But I blame windows! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted July 13, 2015 Share Posted July 13, 2015 Weird, apparently my comment didn't post? Basically: 1) No worries, Windows/Linux can't even agree on how to go to the next line ffs >_< 2) That's really cool, I've always loved the idea of pushing the desktop, especially a gaming desktop, into the rack! Keep us updated ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted July 13, 2015 Share Posted July 13, 2015 As for actual advice, ping won't really help. It'll just give you the round trip network time, which should be negligible (sub 1ms as you stated). It sounds like the real measurement is FPS. So you need to find some RaspPi tool to measure that (unless there's a better approach?) cause FPS is hard! One trick for bandwidth though would be to have Windows run Resource Monitor (in the "performance" tab of Task Manager). That way you'd get a live "stream" of the uploading it's doing directly to your raspberry pi. And since you're streaming video anyway, that resource monitor is basically free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_David Wiggins Posted July 13, 2015 Share Posted July 13, 2015 There is also a cool cross platform tool called iperf. Set it as server on one device, set up client on the other to connect (just run the software with the s or c switch respectively ) it transfers a bit of dummy data from one to the other and shows how long and how much per second. I use it to test connections to a vmware vcenter setup across an IPSEC tunnel. Give it a try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_610GARAGE Posted July 13, 2015 Author Share Posted July 13, 2015 John Mink I will absolutely keep you guys up to date. I was actually planning on posting my step by step instructions that I was writing for myself. Also, using the resource monitor is a great idea. Especially when rdp is acting up for no apparent reason. David Wiggins Thats exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. After doing a little testing, I found that the usb ethernet adapter is faster than the internal ethernet adapter with tcp. And over udp, the external ethernet adapter looks to be more stable. UDP: onboard 95.8Mbits/sec 0.117 ns external 101Mbits/sec 0.119 ns TCP: onboard 94.2 MBits/sec External 192Mbits/sec Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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