[AusNOG] International traffic speeds

[Andrew Yager]

Hi All,

Thanks for the many and helpful replies on and off list (including the awesome person from Vocus who replied within 2 minutes!)

We were predominantly interested in testing throughput on the basis that we were seeing relatively ordinary results from HTTP and FTP servers in our tests and were blaming the endpoint as the most likely cause.

The "simplest" test to run was to start up a few torrents for Linux ISOs and other content and then keep track of some flow data to see the source/destinations. The initial mistake we made her was not to properly set the uTorrent limit, so our transfers were held to 10mbps. We pretty quickly fixed that. Probably most people less innocent than me already knew this though...

This showed pretty conclusively we were pulling in the hundreds of megabits without any real drama, which was what I was thinking we would see.

All that said, I've found a bunch of tools and have some ideas for testing in future should they be needed. Probably the most helpful was the suggestion to set up a number of servers on AWS or Azure and run tools like Iperf to them while you test. I'd heard if the M-labs tools but never given them a run. Quite helpful and clear and we will do some testing with a few last mile services as the Java versions may be very useful for fault diagnosis.

I personally wouldn't bother with speedtest.net mirrors; pretty much a waste of time.

By the way, if anyone does want to share thoughts on performance (particularly who you have found good for 500meg+ of international capacity) I'd be interested in a chat about what you liked/disliked and how you have found providers have performed.

Thanks!
Andrew

Sent from my iPhone

> On 23 Jul 2013, at 11:27 pm, Paul Brooks <pbrooks-ausnog at layer10.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Which metric are you interested in testing - aggregate throughput? latency? jitter? packet-loss?
> Test method vary depending on what you are measuring.
> If its throughput you want to test, what rough range of capacity are you looking to test - tens, hundreds, or thousands of Mbps? 
> Methods vary depending on the scale of the result you are looking for.
> 
> While its tempting to just download a large file and time it, in most cases a simple HTTP or FTP transfer will not give you a meaningful result.
> 
> 
> Sent unplugged
> 
> 
>> On 23/07/2013 9:21 PM, Andrew Yager wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> Looking for a convincing way to get some concept of the "real" international speeds we are getting on our network that doesn't involve transit provider FUD.
>> 
>> Does anyone have any good suggestions of good ways to test such things in ways that have reliable speed and coverage? (Particularly interested in testing PIPE and Vocus in case anyone was wondering...)
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Andrew
>> 
>> --
>> Andrew Yager, Managing Director   (MACS Snr CP BCompSc MCP MCE JNCIA-Junos)
>> Real World Technology Solutions Pty Ltd  - IT people you can trust
>> ph: 1300 798 718 or (02) 9037 0500
>> fax: (02) 9037 0591 mob: 0405 152 568
>> http://www.rwts.com.au/
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> AusNOG mailing list
>> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
>> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>