Measuring/testing wireless performance

[Per Olav]

Hi, i've been doing some testing today on my wireless network(s) to see if changing channels etc would improve speed.
There are a couple of other wireless networks around here
So far, it seems like the benefits of trying different channels are minimal, ca 0.1-0.2 MB/s.

My D-link 624 has a throughput of 3.0MB/s which I think is a bit low.

I tried my other AP, a SMC Barricade which was twice the price of the D-link, and
it has a significant lower wifi performance. I measured it @ 2.3MB/s! even worse..

I used /usr/bin/scp to test by copying a ~200MB file from a computer wired to the AP, and to a wireless gentoo client with PCI-wireless card (MadWifi/Atheros-based) using WPA security.

Is this a reliable way to test the performance?
It would be nice if some of you can do this test on your networks to see what's slow/normal/fast.

The test should take about 60-90 seconds, so I hope you can spare the time

-Per Olav

[xmit]

$ netio -t lab2

NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26
(C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel

TCP connection established.
Packet size 1k bytes: 3046 KByte/s Tx, 2737 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 2k bytes: 2852 KByte/s Tx, 2713 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 4k bytes: 2835 KByte/s Tx, 2743 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 8k bytes: 2703 KByte/s Tx, 2731 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes: 2845 KByte/s Tx, 2749 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes: 2804 KByte/s Tx, 2736 KByte/s Rx.
Done.

Hardware used:
- Thinkpad T22, atheros cardbus, madwifi drivers, wpa psk, netio client
- asus wlan router wl500gd, openwrt firmware
- Desktop PC, 100Mbit ethernet, netio server

[Per Olav]

Thanks! Nice tool.. tried it myself:

netio -t lynx

NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26
(C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel

TCP connection established.
Packet size 1k bytes: 2958 KByte/s Tx, 1747 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 2k bytes: 3111 KByte/s Tx, 1789 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 4k bytes: 3062 KByte/s Tx, 2058 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 8k bytes: 3063 KByte/s Tx, 1429 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes: 3182 KByte/s Tx, 1412 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes: 2697 KByte/s Tx, 2370 KByte/s Rx.
Done.

Seems like yours is a bit more stable than mine. The server (lynx) is an old 450MHz, I don't know if that will affect the result