FTP Speed Testing using IPerf and RB450's

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hi Guys,
I’m new to the forum and before I get started I would just like to say G’day and thanks in advance for any help granted from these forums.
OK, so basically I work for an ISP who have many large business contracts. Lately we have had issues with speed testing and as such I have been asked to find a “better” method to perform network speed testing.
I am keen to use Routerboard 450’s as we have quite a few in stock. My questions being..

Has anyone use RB450’s to perform speed testing using IPerf with FTP?
Is IPerf compatible with RB’s..ie does it run 100%?
How is FTP transfer performance through the RB? Is it accurate? Does it effect the throughput?
What is the available disk-space on the Routerboards? is it easy to add more? (keep files large files for FTP testing)
And finally, how does the RB450 CPU handle FTP transfer tests? lag at all?

If I could get a response or 10 it would be muchly appreciated. Any info will be a bonus. Thanks again in advance!

Oz

2

hey guys, any help on the subject would be a bonus. Cheers

3

Any information on using IPerf with Mikrotiks would be helpful

4

  1. IPerf and FTP are two completely unrelated things.

  2. RouterOS has it’s own bandwidth testing. In WinBox it’s under Tools->BTest Server and Tools->Bandwidth Test. Client/server for Windows is also available (http://www.mikrotik.com/download/btest.exe).

5

This applies to the built in bandwidth testing as well as using FTP as a bandwidth test: don’t involve the routers that you’re trying to test in terminating the data stream. Serving a file via FTP is a completely different task from routing packets in an FTP stream.

6

Ok, I must be a tad confused.
I need a solution so that we can test customers speed from their premises to our head office without any intervention from the customer.
We have previously just been setting up filezilla at both ends and doing an FTP transfer whilst running NetMeter.
This isnt the best option.

can anyone suggest a more reliable method? would be much appreciated.

7

Install a dedicated router to run a bandwidth test server on, manual hasn’t made it to the wiki yet: http://www.mikrotik.com/testdocs/ros/3.0/tools/btest.php

Then use the Windows client to put a laptop behind the customer’s CPE and home it against the bandwidth test server.

Or use the same principle to have a dedicated iperf server in your network.

8

He’s trying to do this without having to involve the customer. It would be AWESOME if mikrotik could use the fetch command and send the output to /dev/null. This would allow you to download files from the router and bypass the slow nand writes.

9

But anything involving the CPE directly (as in, the traffic stream terminates on the CPE, be it the CPE itself downloading something or acting as Mikrotik bandwidth test client) will not really test its routing/bridging performance as you want to test pushing packets vs terminating packets. Bandwidth test streams don’t cause disk IO but are still slower as you need to ACK on TCP, and do whatever it does on a UDP stream.
To reliably test you’ll have to put something behind the CPE. If that’s not possible, I guess install a centralized router as a bandwidth test server and use the built in client on the CPE, but be aware that the results may vary from what you’ll see when the customer passes traffic.