I have a mikrotik hap ax3 router and a windows computer. I would like to benchmark the connection speed between the router and the computer so I can better decide which wifi channels to use.
When I had openwrt I used to do this by installing iperf3 on both sides of the connection, but with mikrotik I’m not sure what my options are.
Thanks!
The only option which will show real throughput of the wireless link between station and AP is to run tests between station (wifi-connected PC) and test server, connected to AP/router using wired connection.
Even though you could run iperf3 “server” on your hAP ax3 inside a container (that’s the only option to run it on a ROS device), this would cause overhead which otherwise wouldn’t be present. And this overhead might be the limiting factor due to: introducing a bit of extra latency due to packet traversing a few virtual networking layers between “regular” bridge and container’s networking stack and due to increased CPU load (WiFi itself is already pretty CPU-intensive, adding another CPU intensive app might cause high CPU load and consequentially reduction in throughout).
I’m not saying that hAP ax3 couldn’t support this kind of setup without dropping wireless throughput (it’s got decently fast CPU), but it’s iffy … and container setup is likely harder than getting another PC to run iperf3 and connect it with ethernet cable to router.
I have seen in winbox that my mikrotik router comes with a server and a client for a bandwidth test. I was hoping that there would be a Windows or Linux implementation that I could run on my computer.
Just download btest.exe from mikrotik website enable the server from the server tab, then at your Mikrotik router terminal
/tool/speed-test address=ipofyourwindowspc
you should get something like this…
/tool/speed-test address=192.168.0.135
;;; results can be limited by cpu, note that traffic generation/termination performance
might not be representative of forwarding performance
status: udp download
time-remaining: 19s
ping-min-avg-max: 1.84ms / 2.59ms / 26.4ms
jitter-min-avg-max: 0s / 666us / 24.2ms
loss: 0% (0/200)
tcp-download: 968Mbps local-cpu-load:89%
tcp-upload: 925Mbps local-cpu-load:44% remote-cpu-load:0%
Oh and take no notice of the udp tests, it’s broken for reasons only a few people know!
As @ToTheFull says, there is windows port of MT’s bandwidth test. However, built-in bandwidth test is (seemingly) even more CPU-heavy and will very likely show lower throughputs than those available in reality.
So I’ll say it again: when testing router/switch/AP capacity, test through the device, not on the device itself. And use industry-standard test suites (such as iperf3), not some vendor-specific implementation which lacks detailed description about what and how it tests.