Author Topic: Internet speed / bandwidth detection or checkup ! (Read 10438 times)

tuxi · « **on:** February 15, 2004, 05:56:48 AM »

Hi..
I was using windows.. but as bandwidth is very precious.. I decided to go for caching proxy so I installed Squid and the made it transparent using the tutorial given on this site. It was working great in the beginning but these days what I am seeing that performance is not good as it was earlier. I checked log files for squid and found that there is no "TCP_HIT" in the cache , every file is getting "TCP_MISS" although same site is opened again but it again shows tcp_miss . I think that is not a big problem, as it may be due to the variations of the data..
My main problem is .. I feel if I used Windows internet connection Sharing then it seems to me that i am getting better performance , on the other hand when I use linux with Squid in transparent way.. I found that my net performance is declined. It is what i feel. Can any body tell me any exact or accurate method of checking my internet speed in Linux as well as in Windows so that I can compare them. BTW I am asking for something which behaves same in linux as well as in windows.

So.. How can I detect my actuall bandwidth in Linux ?

Thanks in Advance..

dragoncity99 · « **Reply #1 on:** February 15, 2004, 12:59:55 PM »

Hi tuxi,
Bandwith load is precious indeed. But i think ur problem is most probably ur proxy server has a bottleneck. Squid have dos and don'ts.
Here's a good link

Goto the next page if u know how to configure squid. Then next page tells u the dos and don'ts in squid.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/07/26/squid.html

Speaking of network/bandwidth monitoring. Linux is equipped with lots of tools. U can try "iptraf" or "MRTG - Multi Router Traffic Grapher" to monitor ur internet usage. Well, i guess it will help u see where's the bottleneck indirectly.

tuxi · « **Reply #2 on:** February 16, 2004, 06:49:55 AM »

Ok. I have downloaded MRTG ! Now how to use that ?

dragoncity99 · « **Reply #3 on:** February 16, 2004, 12:04:28 PM »

Please refer to the unix installation guide. It's in MRTG's official website.

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg-unix-guide.html

One more advice is: Make sure u install net-snmp
If u are using fedora make sure u use add this line to ur startup script: LANG=en_US

dragoncity99 · « **Reply #4 on:** February 16, 2004, 01:04:35 PM »

This is the easiest way to configure MRTG of all the configuration settings I used so far. I used it for Redhat 7.x and Fedora Core 1. Try this url:

http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/mrtg.htm

tuxi · « **Reply #5 on:** February 19, 2004, 07:33:27 AM »

Well.. i was seing the MRTG .. but i m here in a big problem.
When i use simple NAT without proxy i found that my lan net performance is better but when i use squid.. it is not good but on the other hand earlier i was running the squid and was infact increasing the internet performance.. !! y so ?
I tried to change refresh_pattern,
I tried to use the default squid.conf provided here in the forum.. but all is vein..
Any genral reason why this is happening to me!!

dragoncity99 · « **Reply #6 on:** February 19, 2004, 03:13:58 PM »

Bottleneck is on ur server now.

Or, maybe u have not clear the cache in ur squid caching directory.

Don't cache something big. In fact squid can function as bandwidth manager. So, check if how large u allow ur incoming data to be.