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

  • From: Vince Hoffman
  • Date: Tue Mar 07 13:54:53 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