DCHP and Router load testing
- by John H
I manage a campground wifi network with an average of 10 - 60 active users. I have encountered issues where the router starts acting flaky (failing to assign DHCP or failing to pass traffic) without any clear warning (low cpu utilization, etc). I upgraded the router a couple times and ended up with a Netgear ProSafe VPN router that seems to be handling the traffic. The interesting thing is that the Netgear has lower specs than the Buffalo router it replaced, indicating the issue is with the DD-WRT firmware. While I'll be pursuing this issue on the dd-wrt forums, I need a way to test routers.
My vision is having 1-2 computers connected on the LAN side and 1-2 computers connected on the WAN side. I want the LAN computers to be generating various type of traffic and connections, as well as requesting DCHP addresses.
A few notes:
The wireless aspect should be a non-issue. Most clients would connect to a wireless bridge and come into the router through a network cable.
I had a monitoring server with Nagios running check_dhcp against the router. This server was connected directly by a network cable, eliminating wifi bridges and other devices from the equation.
This question is somewhat related, but not exactly: Load testing wireless LANs I am going to look at IxChariot.
While I'd ideally like to use a 1 computer on each side running Linux and preferably free software, I can entertain running Windows, multiple computers, or non-free software.
Total bandwidth doesn't seem to be the issue. I can transfer large files all day. Even on the busiest days, the users seemed to only pull ~5Mbps. There is very little "LAN to LAN traffic" and most of it might never have reached the main router.
The issue I need to test for seems to be tied to active users, or more appropriately, active sessions.
I know active users or active clients is a meaningless term from a router standpoint and wouldn't mind having more appropriate terms to use.
Summary: I need a way to test a routers ability in handling traffic from a large number of clients. My current strategy is to purchase a router, deploy it, and see how it fails in the live environment.
