Network Load Simulation

Networking & Firewalls
1

Good afternoon everyone!

I have a question that I have been pondering for a while now. How does one go about simulating actual network load? Sure I can see my “speed” through a speed test, and that’s certainly valuable information. But what I want to do is actually simulate a “typical” load, or perhaps be able to see how something would perform if x number of devices were to join the network.

I guess you can say that what I want to know is if all the devices on my network were active, hard, for more than 30-90 seconds with multiple connections going at one time (get the state table and MBUF built up). Get Suricata multiple things to look at simultaneously, etc.

My ISP’s connection is such that I have a hard time manually getting a lot of devices going long enough to put a decent load on the system. So how do I get it going in an easier, more sustainable manner for say 30 minutes?

Thanks,

~T

1 Like
2

Iperf is good for simple load testing

There are a few commercially available ones that do offer free trials such as the Solar Winds WAN Killer Network Traffic Generator but I have not really used any of them besides iperf.

3

I’ve used public perf servers to run multi connection, 30-90 second tests and I watch ping times during that to measure buffer bloat. I’m just wondering how Suricata plays into that from the standpoint of multiple IPs and protocols and signatures. How does it compare to an authentic, real world load?