[Make-wifi-fast] flent testers wanted prior to next release

[Dave Taht]

Toke has been busy adding new features to the flent network test tool.
I consider it *almost* stable enough for a new release. Some of the
development has been focused on making the flent-gui much faster and
more responsive (as our data sets have got larger), others on
providing better default command line output, and there's other fixes
across the board, including QT5 support.

In particular, I fear we've broken windows users of flent. I would
dearly like it if some more folk out there using flent could pull the
latest git version and see if there are any new bugs or regressions in
it, any of the the 87 tests, and the plotters, before freezing the
code for a new year's release.

github: https://github.com/tohojo/flent
main site: https://flent.org/

While you are at it, please feel free to stress out any of the flent
servers as a target, give the new cake a shot and compare it against
htb+fq_codel or your aqm of choice, or fiddle with the new wifi code,
and share your data. tcp_nup, tcp_ndown, rrul, rrul_be remain the main
tests, but the square wave one is turning out interesting.... :)

And if you have any feature requests or bugs to file, please get them
in soon to the github!

We could also use better documentation and tutorials for use... some
more example scripts leveraging things like the cpu_stats and
qdisc_stats tools, and so on,

Active public servers include:

flent-freemont.bufferbloat.net
( this is colocated with flent-bbr-west which has bbr on by default - an
interesting test might be testing both these servers at the same time
via the rtt_fair* tests from your location)

flent-dallas.bufferbloat.net
flent-london.bufferbloat.net
flent-tokyo.bufferbloat.net
flent-newark.bufferbloat.net

There are also netperf-west and netperf-east and netperf-eu and no
doubt a few others.

We plan to add a few BBR enabled servers over the holidays.

The changelog so far:


- Support PyQt5 in the GUI (and prefer it over PyQt4). If PyQt5 is not
found, fall back to PyQt4.


- Add new SummaryFormatter that outputs mean and median values for
each data series. This is the new default formatter, meaning that its
output will be shown after a test run if no other formatter (or plot)
is specified.

- Support multiprocessing in the GUI. When loading several plots at
once, plotting will now be passed off to separate worker processes.

  This allows plotting to use all the available processors on the
machine, and speeds up loading of many plots tremendously (initial
load is sped up by an order of magnitude). This change also means that
re-plotting on config changes will be done dynamically in the
background, which makes the GUI more responsive.

- Make text completely black in the default colour scheme. This
increases contrast, and helps legibility, especially on printed
figures.


- Some internal code changes: Port command line parser from the old
optparse class to the newer argparse, and fix a bunch of linter


-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org