Networking Benchmarks

• Diverse websites already do test the throughput of diverse hardware and switches and operating systems, e.g. https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/

(However such guides only apply for hardware running the factory firmware, once openwrt or any third-party firmware is installed, the network capabilities will switch to the network stack in openwrt or any third-party firmware used)

• Latency (i.e. the time delay between two interactions) is often not measured at all, or they neglect to measure latency under load. Exactly this has been addressed by the project https://www.bufferbloat.net/
  • The project bufferbloat utilizes OpenWrt for measurements and experiments: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt

• Iperf, JPerf (Graphical Iperf), Netperf
• Netem (Network Emulator)
• see wireless.overview for diverse tools available in the OpenWrt package respos; (security is a again different field then benchmarking throughput and latency if you are bored)
• puppet, etc etc
• top
  • In I noticed “sirq” consuming 99% of the CPU (e.g. Ticket 7356)
  • ksoftirqd is the kernel thread responsible for servicing software IRQs which is the context in which Ethernet frames are processe for the RX path, what this means here is:
  1. you are CPU bound; the hardware might be moving packet faster but software cannot keep up
  2. the NAPI implementation (if existing in the driver) might need some tweaking, in particular I see no likely(__napi_schedule_prep) for instance