ICMP Bandwidth Test

Document revision 1.0 (28-Apr-2003)
This document applies to MikroTik RouterOS v2.7

Table of Contents
Summary
Specifications
Related Documents
ICMP Bandwith Test

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 : Any
Home menu level : /tool
Standards and Technologies : ICMP (RFC792)
Hardware usage : not significant

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.

Property Description

do (name) - assigned name of the script to start
first-ping-size (integer: 32..64000; default: 32) - first ICMP packet size
second-ping-size (integer: 32..64000; default: 1500) - second ICMP packet size
time between pings (integer) - the time between first and 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
once (option) - specifies that the ping will be performed only once
interval (time: 20ms..5s) - time interval between two ping repetitions

Example

In the following example we will test the bandwith to a host with an 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>