[Cerowrt-devel] RFC: Realtime Response Under Load (rrul) test specification

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

I have been working on developing a specification for testing networks
more effectively for various side effects of bufferbloat, notably
gaming and voip performance, and especially web performance.... as
well as a few other things that concerned me, such as IPv6 behavior,
and the effects of packet classification.

A key goal is to be able to measure the quality of the user experience
while a network is otherwise busy, with complex stuff going on in the
background, but with a simple presentation of the results in the end,
in under 60 seconds.

While it's not done yet, it escaped into the wild today, and I might
as well solicit wider opinions on it, sooo... get the spec at:

https://github.com/dtaht/deBloat/blob/master/spec/rrule.doc?raw=true

Portions of the test are being prototyped in the netperf-wrappers repo
on github. The initial results of the rrul test on several hotel
networks I've tried it on are "interesting". Example:
http://www.teklibre.com/~d/rrul2_conference.pdf

A major sticking point at the moment is to come up with an equivalent
of the chrome-benchmarks for measuring relative web page performance
with and without a network load, or to merely incorporate some
automated form of that benchmark into the overall test load.

The end goal is to have a complex, comprehensive benchmark of some
core networking issues, that produces simple results, whether they be
via a java tool like icsi's, or via flash on the web, or the command
line, via something like netperf.

Related resources:

netperf 2.6 or later running on a fairly nearby server
https://github.com/tohojo/netperf-wrapper
python-matplotlib

I look forward to your comments.

-- 
Dave Täht

Fixing bufferbloat with cerowrt: http://www.teklibre.com/cerowrt/subscribe.html