Recently I’ve been playing with Linux’s QoS features in order to make my home Internet service a little better. Since I’m primarily interested in latency I used ping to benchmark the various configurations. This works reasonably well but it quickly becomes hard to compare the results.
So I decided to build a tool to perform several ping experiments, store the results and graph them. The result of this work is ping-exp.
At present ping-exp can vary the destination host name as well as the TOS field. The interval between pings and total number of pings is globally configurable. The results can be written to a file to be loaded later, output to a PNG or both. Line and scatter plots are supported. When not writing the image to a file ping-exp displays the graph using Matplotlib’s default graph viewer. This allows zooming in on interesting parts of the graph. In the future I’d like to add the ability to specify the ping packet size.
As an aside, Python and Matplotlib make this kind of stuff so much fun.
Below are a few graphs created by ping-exp.
ping-exp example #1
ping-exp example #2
ping-exp example #3