Test wireless connection reliability, e.g. packet drops

[Dan Dascalescu]

What tools do people use to test the longer-term (hours) reliability of their high-bandwidth wireless connections through a router? I'm looking for something a little more sophisticated than "copy a large file" or "watch Netflix".

I know about iperf3 for measuring throughput, but I would like to stress test my router and measure how reliable wireless connections are over extended periods of time, to eliminate the router as a cause of my Play-Fi wireless speakers occasionally stopping playback for no discernible reason.

If I understand correctly, ping (ICMP) isn't the right tool for this, because it only sends very little data. What I'd want to simulate is traffic at X Mbps for Y hours (where X is, say, half the router's advertised bandwidth), and see at least how many packets have been dropped. Ideally, I'd also see a distribution of latencies, similar to what ab provides, e.g. X% of the packets made it in < Y ms.

Here's the same question for points:

https://superuser.com/questions/119...lity-of-wireless-connections-through-a-router

 

[Nullity]

You could use the router's command-line tools like "wl", "ip", and "ifconfig" to view statistics that should include network errors & whatnot.

Though, let's say you see errors, what next? How do you fix it or know what's causing it?

My new microwave causes my WiFi to almost completely crash...



Is there any other wireless device that's having a problem aside from the Play-Fi device?


Yeah... trouble-shooting wireless is not fun... We're happy to help though. Good luck!

 

[thiggins]

If ApacheBench does what you want, why not use it?
iperf3 lets you set file size among other things.

As Nullity pointed out, the issue is diagnosis.

There are other tools that can provide a throughput vs. time plot.
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/basics/lanwan-basics/32252-three-more-ways-to-measure-network-speed
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/bas...ur-network-five-ways-to-measure-network-speed

 

[RMerlin]

Under Windows, the following command will give you a lot of good information regarding dropped packets:

netstat -s

That's what I used a few years ago to diagnose a problem with my Ethernet cable. My transfer rate was abnormally low, running that command showed me a lot of retransmitted packets, which was solved after I recrimped my cable.