[ale] Measuring DSL performance

[John Wells]

Greg,

The one I've used most is bwmon (http://bwmon.sf.net).  Works pretty
well...just parses /proc/net/dev and maintains average over a certain time
period, but it has some glitches.  For instance, it currently is telling
me that I have had a 3554.23 kbps max upstream throughput since I came
online tonight.  Um, yeah, ok.

I can't for the life of me remember the name of the other one, although it
was similar to bwmon and produced slightly different results.  Again, same
thing...parsing the /proc/net/dev file.  I downloaded it at around 3am
Sunday morning, gave it a quick couple of test runs, and deleted it before
bed...

Anyway, I guess I'll stick with bwmon and dslreports.  What I'm really
interested in testing is whether throughput is affected at all by using
PPPOE...in other words, whether I'll see an (albeit insignificant)
increase in spead by ridding myself of PPPOE overhead.  Course, I'm really
going with no-PPPOE so my connection will no longer drop every 20 or so
minutes, but I'm still curious as to what effect, if any, there will be. 
And, mind you, the test would be inherently flawed (no real control), but
what the hell ;-)

Thanks,

John

Greg said:
> What tools have you found ?  and are they what you want ?  You might
> also try hitting the logging functions and such.  Also try to search for
> "bandwidth monitors Linux" "network monitors Linux"  and several
> different search terms.  You also should know *how* they work since many
> just access and parse log files that you could then just save and
> examine yourself. OpenBSD uses altq, mrtg (?), and some other network
> monitors that I am sure you could download and compile.  Syslog is
> prominent I think.
>
> If you don't find what you want, then give the list another ring and I
> will send you all of what I have found in Greg's Big List of Links
> (which is just a directory of saved pages over the many years and is not
> organized, so it would take a while).  Of course, you could also call up
> your ISP and see if what they have is useful.  Many keep such statistics
> as a matter of doing business.  I know when I was with Mindspring they
> had this info on their little app that connected you to the Internet.
>
> I don't really think that you will see a big difference, unless your ISP
> throttles the bandwidth, since Bell South owns the wires.  All that they
> will do is just push a few buttons/use a different router/whatever to
> change you over.  If it's all the same equipment/technology then it will
> be the same.  I have noticed that speedfactory's newsgroups seem to be a
> bit slower then telocity's were - or at least it seems that way.  I
> think that this is just due to Telocity's bigger size and more than
> likely bigger/faster/more hardware for news servers.
>
> Greg



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