Network Performance

[Kevin Waldon]

Hi All,

I have some problems when it comes to network performance.  I started this job 3 months ago to the day and I report to a Non-IT VP who worked in IT 25 years ago.  I constantly get chewed about the network performance and how I need to fix it.  I dug into my wireshark and went to work.  1st let me list the gear I have to give you an idea of my infrastructure:

In our corporate office:  WAVE 1gb DIA to Sophos SG300 to CORE- Meraki MS220 to IDF1-Meraki MS220 and Multiple Meraki MR52's and MR33's.  

Farm:  Our Farm is uses the following - Satellite 50 mb connection -- Sophos RED 50 -- Meraki MS220-- Multiple MR52's and MR33's.  We route traffic to our corporate office for internet and cloud offerings such as office 365 one drive and cloud applications. 

Here is what I found:  The DIA circuit does not shape traffic. Performing a sniffer trace showed me marking traffic ie. Avaya phone system marking voice EF and utilizing Sophos QOS doesn't matter because the traffic returns Best Effort. I am working with WAVE (our ISP) to implement SD-WAN here at our corporate office to be able to mark traffic and utilize QOS in this manner.  To that point, I speed test on our corporate LAN and I receive 500 mbps down and 800 mbps up.  On our Corporate Wireless from my.meraki.com 70 mbps to 100 mbps. but from a speed test from a browser I get 30 - 50 mbps.  In our Farm our Wi-Fi speeds from our browser app 10 - 20 mbps on a good day.  My firmware is updated on all AP's, Switches and Sophos Firewall. 

To that end, I am at my wits end to find out why our network is "slow".  I am open to all input and solutions.  

Thank you for this platform!

[balaji.bandi]

This required lot of analysis, and step approach to improve services working as expected, since lot of vendor involved you need to focus how you want to start testing.

personally, I test from the Internet point to each level to see where the performance is getting worse.

so let's start connecting directly - as you mentioned the Lan you getting a performance.

On the switch I would check all the ports working as expected - no packet drops or CRC error?

From wireless to Local LAN transfer how is the speeds ?

[Kevin Waldon]

Hi BB,

I checked the connection from switch to wireless ap's and received no drops or CRC errors.  

Thank you for your input.

[balaji.bandi]

then you need to do test each segment level as suggested before.

[ammahend]

iPerf may be good place to start for free, if you YouTube, you will find a lot of video to do performance test within your network or from within network to cloud. 
I am sure you will get many more suggestions here. 

[Kevin Waldon]

I didn't have much success with iPerf.  I attempted to test with iPerf and I wouldn't get a response.

In the video I watched referred to "Server IP's" which I didn't understand.  I used the servers iPerf website such as the screen shot shown above.  

[balaji.bandi]

If you looking to use Iperf example as below your network.

end device------------switch1-----------switch2-----------switch3-----------Router-------Internet

If the performance issue you have  example switch 2:

then you need to have iperf server need to connect to switch2, and run as server, from end device you run as client to send traffic.

Server IP example 192.168.1.1

iperf3 -s

On client 192.168.100.5 (example)  

iPerf3 -c 192.168.1.1