Testing leased line

[ncnaveen_arasu]

Hi friends,

When ever we have commissioned a new physical WAN link we will be assured that for example, a bandwidth of 100Mbps from an ISP. How do we test the link wether it is capable of passing a traffic of 100Mbps other than putting a load on the link via ping command. Please let us know the way how can we put the load to test the links full capability.

Thanks in advance,

Naveen

[Richard Burts]

Doing a single ping over the link is not a good test. For one thing processing ping and generating a response is more a test of the processor which generates the response than it is a test of the circuit.

Another issue to consider is that a single stream of traffic is not a good test of the circuit. It is a much better test if you can arrange for multiple streams of traffic.

It would be a better test of the circuit capacity if you could use a tool such as smart bits to generate the traffic rather than depending on a host connected to the router or depending on the router itself to generate test traffic.

HTH

Rick

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[acazarkov]

do you have a link for this programs?

[mfurnival]

If hardware based packet generators are out of the question you can use iperf which gives a good indication of what bandwidth you are getting. One end runs a server connection and the other end acts as a client and they stream traffic between themselves and tell you what bandwidth you are getting. There are lots of options such as modifying TCP window size etc. The server / client can be run on Windows or Linux.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

For quick verification of provisioned bandwidth, I've used a software based traffic generator that can generate traffic faster than the nominal capacity of the the link.  For example, if I send 120 Mbps across a nominal 100 Mbps, I expect 100 Mbps to be received on the other side.