iPerf testing WiFi vs Powerline

[calzor suzay]

Scenario is I have an RT-AC68U with an SSD attached sharing over FTP to a Raspberry Pi 2.
The Pi connects over a PowerLine adapter as it has no WiFi built in but wanted to test a WiFi dongle I have to see it it's faster/same/worse. I don't have an issue with the current speed but it's always nice to know what you have in use is the best use of resources

From a quick look iPerf seems the best free product but at this point I'm unsure how to actually test the Router SSD to Pi performance, does anyone know what I need to enable/try/type in iPerf on the Pi to run a test?
I obviously need to enable/disable the LAN/WiFi etc on the Pi but unsure how/if I can perform this test using iPerf and the router.

 

[ColinTaylor]

You need to have iperf (preferably iperf3) installed on both the router and the Pi. Then you can start one device in server mode and the other as a client.

 

[calzor suzay]

Ahh yes I guess this makes sense, I was thinking from the perspective of placing it on the Pi then trying to work out how it connects to the router, thanks I'll give it a go

 

[sfx2000]

With regards to the Pi - ethernet will be better than WiFi - but ultimately, they're limited by the USB2 bus on the PI itself (Pi3's WiFi is fairly slow - 30-35 Mbit/Sec, which is probably due to it running thru the SDIO bus)

Powerline will likely be the ultimate limit - depends on the quality of the PLC link...

 

[calzor suzay]

Yeah the Pi is all limited by USB2 so I'll you'll never see 802.11ac speeds, the dongle I have is 802.11n 2.4 GHz but just want to make sure the powerline is better rather than assuming

 

[ColinTaylor]

Or you could just do some "real world"-type tests. Like ftp'ing a very large file in each direction. It won't be an accurate test of the network speed (because of things like disk caching) but it's probably good enough to determine if one method is better than the other.