Banwidth Analysis/Monitor

[superfletch]

Hello,

Sorry if this kind of thing has been posted already but I have had a good search and can't find what I'm after.

I'd like to know if anyone knows of any good (and preferably free) applications which can be installed on a single machine to monitor how much bandwidth different applications are demanding and can produce (or at least help produce) half decent reports. I'll explain why...


I work for a LA rather than in school we've moved office recently and it's been proposed that a lot of our support team will use a wireless network connection to do day to day support due to very limited availability of wired network points in the new building. (We've already had our knuckles rapped from corporate IT for installing a switch and been told to remove it).

Our wireless has just gone live and I've noticed a serious drop in the performance of certain apps. I'd really like to be able to report on the impact it has upon our key applications. To do this I need to be able to demonstrate how much bandwidth those applications eat on the wired network and then compare it to the wireless. Some of our applications are fairly bandwidth intensive such as Remote support, a call logging SQL database, networked SIMS, FTP's etc which is why I want to be able to itemise the usage of particular applications.


Anyone know then of a good app which will tell me how much bandwidth any of my greedy applications are gobbling at a given time?

TIA

[SYNACK]

You should be able to get this data from a packet sniffer with a little bit of work, there are a couple of open source ones Wireshark and Packetyzer that should give you access to that information. You will need to interpret the packet dumps though.

I think that a large bit of the issue with wireless in your situation would be the extra latency as well because most of those programs make lots of little network transmissions all of the time as you are doing stuff. The extra latency is a killer.

[Geoff]

With wireshark you can use the filters to detect how much bandwidth is being used by apps. Also check out the fun tools in the Statistics menu.

[tom_newton]

I would suggest that you may be barking up the proverbial wrong tree.

Bandwidth on wireless is "ok", it's latency that suffers. For example, my VoIP hardphone is fine on the end of a 10meg wired link, but a so-called 54meg wireless and a softphone suffer too many dropouts. I'm only needing ~16k but it is latency that matters there.

The advice to use wireshark stands well - but examine the frequency of packets, and try, if possible to compare with the responsiveness of the app.

What apps are you using? Maybe the software company who made them has some info on the subject?

[superfletch]

Hi there,

Thanks to all of your replies on this subject, especially the information about latency from Synack and Tom, I'll get wireshark installed and have a look.

A couple of the apps will definately add extra latency, the remote support one videos what is going on all the time so I reckon that will.

Genuinely, thanks.