Using the throughput wizard

Introduction

At times you find yourself repetitively tweaking the speed of a Frame Blasting flow: a little bit faster has too much loss, slightly slower results in no loss, slightly faster again... This is time-consuming and a perfect case for the Throughput wizard.

This Throughput wizard creates several Frame Blasting flows. Each flow sends the same frames but a different load. You'll configure the start speed, the final speed, and the increment between them. This wizard is an easy way to generate different flows with a different load in a single scenario. The 6 steps below explain how to configure such a traffic pattern.

Create the traffic pattern

Next steps

The next pages of the wizard configure the source and destination ByteBlower ports of the flows. You don't need to use the wizard for these ports, if you press 'Finish' the remaining config can also do the config in the GUI itself. A useful hint, with right-click and copy-down you can easily copy the same value to all flows below.

Example result

The screenshot zooms in on the Frame Blasting Flows table in the report. It shows the behavior of our NAT device with small frames. As you'll see in the middle column, the number of transmitted packets steadily increases from 15,000,000. At Throughput Flow 19, the NAT is overloaded and sustains a huge loss of traffic.

Final word

The throughput wizard is an easy way to measure the throughput. Its biggest advantage is that you have total control over the traffic if you want to you can still tweak the scenario. For instance, why not add a TCP flow to it? The large report on the other hand might well be a disadvantage. If you're just interested in getting the throughput limit of your device, then it might be worthwhile to look into the RFC-2544 wizard.