Best Tools to Diagnose Slowdowns?

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EwanG

EwanG

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I move a lot of large files around my home network, and am trying to figure out where to put my next investment in upgrading to speed things up a bit. The problem is that I can't afford to just upgrade everything (not that most folks could). Current setup is a Linksys E4200 that uses wireless to support the family's tablets, wired to support a small NAS and a laptop which handles our VOIP for voice and an alarm system, and Powerline for the two main computers that have the big external drives (both have a 4 disk array in RAID 0 attached via USB-3).

When I had just the upstairs computer attached via Powerline and the main downstairs attached via wireless my file transfers (shown in Windows) were running about 4 mb/s. When I put that one on Powerline as well it slowed down noticably (average between 2-3 mb/s). Which was still better than when I had both systems on wireless and could almost kill the connection anytime I ran the downstairs microwave.

Am thinking of upgrading the router to one of the 802.11ac series, but not sure if that will help or not.

I am trying to decide if I'd get biggest bang for the buck from a router upgrade or if I need to do something else? Am wondering if there are any tools out there that could help me see WHERE the issue is (perhaps congestion on the router, or maybe the adapter is getting too much contention, or...)?
 
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I doubt the router is being saturated, but rather your Wi-Fi is just dropping off. Obviously the microwave kills it, that's a known as they operate at the same freq. Monitoring tools; hum... you gave the throughputs. 4mb/s down to 2. Or just do a test yourself. Move a 100 gigabyte file around and time it. If you have a laptop in the same room as the router it will be faster than if it's on the other side of a wall or floor. And over 1000 Ethernet it will be there in a few seconds.

Routers from normal stores are just toys anyway. Get a 1 watt unit(or more) if you want your Wi-Fi to be awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNi06R4OCcA
Just be sure to have random password(numbers, upper & lower case) 17 or more digits long. As every kid...
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wdmfiber

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Probably the best thing you can do... also costs very little, but may be hard and time consuming. But if you're not moving anytime soon, get a thousand foot roll of cat 5e (or 6) and wire everything(for gigabit 1000). You may also need a decent 10/100/1000 switch, I'd go unmanaged.

Obviously you'll still need Wi-Fi for the toys(tablets, ect).

(*edit: corrected my spelling)
 
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bill001g

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802.11ac will do nothing for you unless you also upgrade your wireless equipment...some like phones and tablets you don't even have a option to upgrade. Your current router already supports the most advanced forms of 802.11n available so unless you buy actual 802.11ac interfaces if will just fall back.

First thing to try is to see if 5g even works for you and what speeds you get off your current router. 5g tends to not have as much interference from neighbors and stuff like microwaves. The key problem is it is much more easily blocked by walls and floors.

The largest future issue with 802.11ac is to get the speeds they talk about they are bonding 4 channels where 802.11n only bonds 2. They then run mimo on top of that just like 802.11n. Although there may appear to be lots of channels you can use in actuality there are only 2 blocks (1 in some countries) of 4 channels that you can transmit at full power and not be subject to shutdown if the router detect weather radar. What will happen is everyone will use this same block and you will have the same issue we see in the 2.4 band with everyone stomping all over each other.

I am going to wait most because I expect 802.11ac to come down in price a lot after the standard is finalized the end of this year. I also will wait to see more real people are getting in their house rather than the benchmarks and the guys who build stuff to brag rather than to use. I strongly suspect 802.11ac may be a little faster but not some huge noticeable amount.

I would have to agree with the previous post the largest bang for the buc is going to be physical ethernet cable. You have already tried the my normal suggestion of powerline devices when wireless works poorly. The only other technology is called MoCA and uses the coax tv wires. This has not been real popular mostly because a lot of the DVR technology uses this technique for mutliroom and you can't have both.
 
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EwanG

EwanG

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Appreciate the comments, but if I don't know if the router is being saturated, then physical cable could make the problem worse. Hence why I asked about monitoring tools rather than purchase recommendations. Anything that y'all can suggest that will help me see where the problem really is?
 
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wdmfiber

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I doubt the router is being saturated, but rather your Wi-Fi is just dropping off. Obviously the microwave kills it, that's a known as they operate at the same freq. Monitoring tools; hum... you gave the throughputs. 4mb/s down to 2. Or just do a test yourself. Move a 100 gigabyte file around and time it. If you have a laptop in the same room as the router it will be faster than if it's on the other side of a wall or floor. And over 1000 Ethernet it will be there in a few seconds.

Routers from normal stores are just toys anyway. Get a 1 watt unit(or more) if you want your Wi-Fi to be awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNi06R4OCcA
Just be sure to have random password(numbers, upper & lower case) 17 or more digits long. As every kid in the neighborhood who has downloaded aircrack and has new(er) Radeon GPU is capable of a strong brute-force attack.
 
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EwanG

EwanG

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Yes, that's why I switched those computers to Powerline - Ethernet over your electrical lines. Which eliminated the interference but did little to increase throughput. Hence my thinking there might be something else I need to look at.

So, I know there are some tools for doing network diagnostics in Linux. I was hoping there were some for Windows. Perhaps not?
 
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bill001g

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There are many tools but almost all require you to collect data in some way. Almost no consumer equipment has the features. The most common way is to directly capture the data which you can use something like wireshark to capture and analyze the data. Problem is you would have to load this on all the end machines and find a way to combine all the files into something useful. The other way is likely not a option since you need what is called a span or mirror port to get wired and any wireless capture only works on unix thanks to microsoft idiot put your head in the sand protection. Even if you were to capture wireless it does not show all the retransmission and such due to errors you can only see the latency. There are some other things like netflow that can get some of the traffic from the router but this is only a feature of third party firmware or commercial routers. You need a still need a dedicated collection machine to keep the data until you get enough to run a report.

I would buy some ethernet cables and string them over the floor just to test. It is you cheapest test and will at least tell you what you need to be looking at to find your problem rather than trying to test everything.
 
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EwanG

EwanG

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OK, I was hoping there might be the equivalent of a "Speedtest" app for your home network where you could try different things on the end point and see things like buffering, retransmits, etc. Sounds like that's something I'd have to either write myself or go with the "lo-tech" that will at least help me rule out some things.

Thanks anyway.
 
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bill001g

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I have used this tool. The primary thing it does is analyses netflow. It can also query SNMP strings from the router to get utilization statistics. I did not suggest this because of the lack of support for netflow and SNMP on consumer routers also even if you would load a third party firmware it can only analyze wan-lan traffic not lan-lan. Still even when you use it with commercial routers that support all the features this is a extremely complex tool to get configured. You really need expert level networking knowledge to get a useful configuration. There are a number of other free tools like nagios or zabbix that do network monitoring...these do not do netflow. And of course there are many commercial ones. Still few if any of these are useful in a home network because of the lack of support for basic things like SNMP.
 
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