Mastodawn

SamB Aug 7, 2023

Are people interested in multi-client stress tests on routers?

Are people interested in multi-client stress tests on routers? - Lemmy.world

I asked this same question on Reddit and I got zero engagement, so perhaps Lemmy has people that care more about their hardware. I recently decided to use some of the tools provided by Mr Salter (netburn) and I have to ask the community if you want to see multi-client stress tests (4K streaming, VoIP, web browsing) used on a wireless router or if the single-client iperf tests are good enough. Bear in mind that pretty much all publications that still test their devices (most don’t) rely on the single-client test method.

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Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever Aug 7, 2023

For a consumer/household: This is almost entirely unnecessary. Basically any halfway competent name brand router/firewall will have no problems with this. You are more likely to see issues coming from your wifi network (which is probably part of your “router”), but that is also an incredibly situational one depending on your environment (how many neighbors, etc). But LAN->WAN NAT is a “solved problem” as it were and you mostly just want to stress test that speed wise.

For enterprise/hotels? Yeah, that is when you are going to have issues with too many clients. And the answer to that is almost always “buy enterprise hardware” rather than “figure out which netgear router I can tape to the ceiling”

More data is always fun (unless you are the one collecting it…) but I just don’t see much benefit from this. And most of the suggestions in this thread are really just ISP tests.

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SamB

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly that collecting the data is not that much fun, especially since yes, I will have to do it. But I think users may benefit to see if the non-enterprise wireless routers can accomplish a certain task. For example, can that expensive Netgear router actually handle four client devices streaming 4K at the same time? What if we add browsing in the mix? The point of this thread was to get an idea if it’s actually worth running these tests (which take quite a bit) and if people are interested in seeing this type of data on the web.

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Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever Aug 7, 2023

For example, can that expensive Netgear router actually handle four client devices streaming 4K at the same time

Can your ISP? If so, yes. Because ~25 Mbps * 4 is not a lot of data. And the NAT for four clients mapped to the same firewall/router is pretty trivial. And no, adding “browsing” is not going to be an issue.

Again, NAT is easy. And it happens on every single packet (big ol’ asterisk on this, but not the venue to get into the specifics), regardless of whether it is one client or two. So what matters is the amount of packets per second that can be processed which these speed tests already cover (albeit, somewhat obfuscated because most people don’t understand the network layers).

And in the enterprise case? That is mostly about whether you can run a mesh network, what signal coverage you have, and the total number of clients (and packets) that need to be processed per second. Which… you are either a complete sicko who wouldn’t be watching reviews online or you are just going to buy a ubiquiti or omada setup.