ICMP Bandwidth Test

Document revision:	1.3 (January 24, 2008, 15:28 GMT)
Applies to:	V3.0

General Information

Summary

The ICMP Bandwidth Tester (Ping Speed) can be used to approximately evaluate the throughput to any remote computer and thereby help to discover network 'bottlenecks'.

Specifications

Packages required: advanced-tools
License required: Level1
Command name: /tool ping-speed
Standards and Technologies: ICMP (RFC792)
Hardware usage: Not significant

ICMP Bandwidth Test

Description

The ICMP test uses two standard echo-requests per second. The time between these pings can be changed. Ping packet size variation makes it possible to approximately evaluate connection parameters and speed with different packet sizes. Statistics for throughput is calculated using the size of the ICMP packet, the interval between ICMP echo-request and echo-reply and the differences between parameters of the first and the second packet. Note that the tool can not estimate the channel throughput exactly and can show imprecise results.

Property Description

(IP address) - IP address to ping

do (name) - assigned name of the script to start

first-ping-size (integer: 32..64000; default: 32) - first ICMP packet size

interval (time: 20ms..5s) - time interval between two ping repetitions

once - specifies that the ping will be performed only once

second-ping-size (integer: 32..64000; default: 1500) - second ICMP packet size

time-between-pings (integer) - the time between the first and the second ICMP echo-requests in seconds. A new ICMP-packet pair will never be sent before the previous pair is completely sent and the algorithm itself will never send more than two requests in one second

Example

In the following example we will test the bandwidth to a host with IP address 159.148.60.2. The interval between repetitions will be 1 second.

[admin@MikroTik] tool> ping-speed 159.148.60.2 interval=1s
    current: 2.23Mbps
    average: 2.61Mbps

[admin@MikroTik] tool>