Here’s something for those network tweakers out there.
if you want to do something a bit more than benchmarking the speed and latency of your internet connection then there is a great little utility that will perform an examination, give you some detailed results and also help university research at the same time.
The ICSI Netalyzr hosted by Berkeley University will a raft of things, including:
- the presense of NAT (Network Address Translation – you’ll be using this when behind a router),
- general connectivity over the two major protocols (TCP & UDP) as well as checking your MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) for optimal performance,
- network packet buffering and whether or not it is excessive (which can be common in consumer routers these days with far too much RAM in them – more on this in a future post).
Sometimes, it’s nice to know what is going on with your network connection and, while this has a lot of detail in it, it can perhaps highlight areas of performance degradation that you can resolve with some tinkering. That said, don’t change settings you don’t understand otherwise it could all end in tears!
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