Network Meter

[gibsonpa]

I have 4 extenders, voip, etc on my home network. Does anyone know of a good (free?) network metering software? I have the vista gadget that shows network usage for it....but I am looking for something that would show network usage between other devices on the network...like my voip handset (not connected to pc), etc.

[jwmcclung]

If you are using a router as your gateway I would recommend flashing it with the Tomato firmware. It has some network usage tools that I use all the time.

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/

Good luck.

JM

[reggie14]

Remember that your extenders really won't be competing with your VOIP device for bandwidth. I'm sure you're running a switched network at home. The extenders will only be stealing bandwidth away from your server. I'm assuming you have a separate device, or at least a separate computer, for VOIP stuff. Now, if you're running VOIP on your server maybe you could run into problems when you're streaming a few HD shows (assuming you're on a 100megabit network).

I've never used Tomato, but it looks good. DD-WRT is another option. Version 2.4 has some pretty simple monitoring built in, and it supports SNMP if you want to do some more intensive monitoring on your server. I think DD-WRT works on more routers than Tomato too.

[Zippster]

DDWRT ftw... new versions fixed lots of old issues and has the bandwith meter along with other goodies, works flawlessly on Linksys I can atest.

[bastafidli]

on Linux I suggest ntop.

[dagar]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Remember that your extenders really won't be competing with your VOIP device for bandwidth. I'm sure you're running a switched network at home. The extenders will only be stealing bandwidth away from your server. I'm assuming you have a separate device, or at least a separate computer, for VOIP stuff. Now, if you're running VOIP on your server maybe you could run into problems when you're streaming a few HD shows (assuming you're on a 100megabit network).

That depends greatly on a few other factors:
- Are the VoIP devices (we'll call them real time service/RTS apps) getting there frames serialized through the same ASIC that is servicing other devices that are using larger datagrams (and thus larger frames)? I would imagine that it's a shared ASIC since that's the preferred method (drives down manufacturing costs)
- If the device is a 'router', i.e. WRT54G (or other), which datagrams are getting transferred out of the ASIC and to the CPU for processing

Okay in many (most?) home user environments it should not matter; unless said user is a Bittorrent user as well. Then we get in to a different conversation entirely (at multiple technical levels). However since this is a LAN discussion (and most likely a simple one) it should be fine.

If the network has a switch with some number of devices cascaded to another switch then you may (stand a good chance) have issues.

It's rarely lack of bandwidth that causes RTS apps to bomb, it's traffic [class] queue starvation. 1500 byte packets will (from a serialization delay standpoint) clobber 80 byte RTS packets. RTS includes VoIP, 'telnet or other interactive sessions', and (my favorite) first person shooters. That's why Bittorrent + playing multiplayer FPS can be problematic; the gazzillion BT Datagrams take all the serializer time and the RTS stuff studders, shudders, and breaks while waiting its' turn 'in line.' The easiest way stop that (for most home users) is to limit any single traffic flow to 80% of available BW. You still can use the aggregate BW but no single flow (i.e. file download) can chew up the whole pipe. Since ISPs don't grow their businesses by offering reliable low queue latency Internet services they optimize their traffic queues (from customer edge to provider core and out) for bandwidth. And bandwidth optimization has a non-trivial and detrimental impact on performance of RTS apps. Usually those problems are circumvented at the [customer] edge.