Measuring network performance
Jan 27th
I order to understand network latency you have to have some way of measuring it, there are a number of options available, ranging from free software to all-in-one solutions costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There are basically two parts to measuring performance over the network.
- Capture the data ( or view it in real time )
- Process the data in a way that gives you some meaningful results
I will go into more detail on data capture in later posts, but for now I am concentrating on simply and effective ways to analyze any data be it previously captured or real time.
In short one of the most effective piece of software to work with network traffic is Wireshark.
Wireshark can be downloaded for free here Wireshark.org
It´s a great tool that can capture data in real time and also analyse captures in great detail
Wireshark has a great deal of features, some that might even suprise experienced wireshark users including flexible command line utilities such a tshark and more.
A lot of my articles on this site will involve Wireshark in some way, as it´s an essential tool in any network engineer’s toolkit.
So if you have not used it, go to wireshark and give it a try.
Related Reading:
ultra low latency blog
Dec 22nd
Low latency is the latest buzz word in the IT industry.
This is especially true in finance (trading in particular), cloud computing, various forms of high performance clustering and even multiplayer online games.
In networking latency has traditionally been measured in milliseconds (ms) a thousandth of a second, more recently we have started to look at microsecond (μs) a millionth of a second.
In future posts we will highlight and investigate emerging tools and trends in the ultra low latency field.