Monitoring Network Traffic To A Host
Background – I am having an issue with occassional pauses when streaming high-bitrate media across my home network to my smart TV. I *suspect*
that the root cause is the (incredibly lame) 100 Mbps Ethernet interface in the TV.
In order to confirm that the peak bitrate really does max out the 100
Mbps connection, I’d like to monitor the communication between my NAS
and the TV. The two devices are on separate VLANs, with routing performed by a CentOS 7 system, so it should theoretically be relatively simple to use an appropriate utility on the “router” to monitor and, if possible, graph the network traffic going to the TV.
Ideally, I could run said utility for the entire time that the media file is playing and then look at its pretty graph to check if/when the bitrate hit 100 Mbps. Being able to watch the pretty graph in real time through a web interface would be nice as well, but is not required.
Is any such program included in CentOS 7 or EPEL 7?
The closest thing that I’ve found thus far is iftop (despite its lack of pretty). Unfortunately, it won’t allow me to see the peak bitrate over the whole period in which the media is playing.
Thanks for any suggestions!
3 thoughts on - Monitoring Network Traffic To A Host
You’ll need a second linux system, but I’d consider using iperf with a client/server setup.
Mark
just looked in my video library, largest file I see is for a multi-language
1080p MP4/x.264 version of Parasite, 2h 11m long, 10GB.
thats 1.3 MB/sec, or about 10 Mbit/sec. *easily* done on 100baseT.
is there any wireless between your server and the TV client ?
next largest file in ‘recent’ is The Irishman, also MP4 x.265 1080p, no subtitles, english-only 5.1 AAC audio, 4.1GB for 3:29 long, thats only
335kByte/sec, or about 3Mbit/sec, heck you could play that on 10baseT
Sony agrees with you.
No. Everything is 1 Gbps wired, except for the interface in the TV
itself. Theoretically, the wireless in the TV is actually faster … until it isn’t.
As an example, I have a 59GiB 4K video, which includes multiple audio and subtitle streams, which is approximately 115 minutes long. That results in a *mean* bitrate of about 73.5 Mbps.ls
If I remove the audio and subtitle streams for languages that I don’t care about, I can reduce the file to 54GiB, a mean bitrate of 66.4 Mbps.
Don’t try playing those on your 10baseT network!
So the question is whether the *peak* bitrate required to play that file, including all the protocol and application overhead, exceeds the capabilities of the TV’s interface. Just watching iftop, I’ve seen the reported bitrate from the “router” to the TV exceed 75 Mbps when playing the smaller file. Is that the highest it gets? I don’t know, because I
don’t have the patience to watch iftop for almost 2 hours.
Thus my original question. I’m looking for something that can tell me the *peak* bitrate to a particular host over the time that the video is playing. Something that could graph it would also be nice; I would expect to see the bitrate plateau at a high level if/when it saturates the TV interface, likely correlated with the pauses that I’m seeing.