RTPL Net Performance Package

Overview

The RTPL (Remote Throughput, Ping and Load) is a package intended to do periodically net performance measurements tests to obtain the network performance from an end user viewpoint. The performance measurements are consisting of roundtrip and throughput measurements between a number of hosts. These measurements are executed by commonly used Internet tools.

Optionally also UDP tests can be executed using the UDPmon toolkit. In these tests a few thousand UDP packets are send that are marked with timestamps and sequence numbers. At the receiving host a.o. UDP bandwidth and the number packets lost can be retrieved from this information. However, the precise timing library, required to be able to calculate these data, is only available at Pentium processors. Due to the limited number packets involved these UDP tests are non-intrusive.

Because we are interested in the network performance from a user viewpoint and not in the maximum possible capacity of a network, the measurement parameters are configured to default values and the test test durations are limited: various long term statistics will blur the short time fluctuations.

The presentation of the results is Web based and dynamic. A combination of Java and JavaScript is used to offer the user various views of the data. The data are presented in the form of HTML tables which can be selected by the user. The Applet can also be used to display the selected data in a plot window.

Documentation

The RTPL package is described in the following documents which are available for on-line viewing and for downloading:

Overview document
In this document an overview is given of this package. It also contains some proposals for a start setup for future tests at the European TEN-155 research network.
Download the overview document in the following formats:
IPP-FOM-UU document
The attention is focused in the document at the performance of the network connecting the sites described here in the "Old Results" section.
Download this document in the following formats:
DAS document
In this document the ATM QoS network connection between the nodes of the DAS computer cluster is compared with the "usual" Internet route.
Download this document in the following formats:
TERENA Document  (PDF)
This project was part of the "TERENA Projects" programme. This document is the end report of the project.

Examples

In this section some links are specified to versions of the package which are currently used.

DAS-3
Tests between some arbitrary DAS-3 nodes which are arbitrarily obtained via the queuing system. Due to other tests this monitor may not run for longer periods.
SPMP DAS-3
StarPlane Management Plane DAS-3. This monitor is currently not running.
Old Results
This link points to some still available results of stopped net performance monitors.

Download

Acknowledgment

Authors

           Hans Blom, Mark Jansen.