Measuring latency

Supercritical@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 40 points –

Hi all,

I'm in a unique situation where my landlord can't log in to his router nor is around/cares to contact the ISP to do so. This is my current setup. Does anyone know how I might go about measuring the latency between the router and my end devices (area shaded in orange)? I'm just curious to see how much my setup is introducing in terms of online games and what not.

And yes, 40 mbps is all we get out in suburban Alaska. Cope with me.

Clarification

28

Just ping it?

Actual traffic might be slightly different, but honestly on a LAN you shouldn't need to worry about latency. But you're not going to be able to run iperf3 on that router in any case.

Sounds good, I'll go ahead and just do this. Connect to landlord's router -> ping test -> connect to my router -> ping test. Thanks for the comment!

Or, you know, just ping your landlords router.

Ping statistics for ________________:
    Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 5ms, Average = 1ms

So if I understand this, there is barely any latency being introduced here.

Yes, why would expect otherwise?

Unless you've got signal issues, wifi doesn't add more than a few ms

Yes, why would expect otherwise?

Because I know very little about network and is why I’m seeking help/input. Thank you for your input.

Radio waves travel at close to the speed of light. Latency generally just comes from raw distance, unless the packets are being processed by a slow / overloaded device on route.

If the wifi has to retry a lot due to noise or low signal you'll see loss and latency spikes, but otherwise its very little.

This is the answer. Although you may need to look up the IP address (a lot of them use 192.168.100.1) and you may need to reconfigure your gateway/firewall/router to route that subnet out its WAN interface while still performing NAT.

Also if the router blocks icmp for some reason you can always manually send an ARP request and check the response latency.

Tracert will give you the latency of each hop required to make it to your destination. Not sure why everyone is complicating it.

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve found essentially less than 1ms of latency between my mini router and my landlord’s router and I’m very happy with that.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
IP Internet Protocol
NAT Network Address Translation
VPN Virtual Private Network

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #286 for this sub, first seen 17th Nov 2023, 20:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

If you want to test what your equipment is doing to your latency, connect your pc directly to your landlord's router, run latency tests multiple times, then set everything up as you normally would and run the same tests again. Some recommended tests for different situations would be fast.com for netflix/video streaming performance, and https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat for bufferbloat. Other things you'll want to check for gaming performance are double-NAT and ping tests for the online games you tend to play.

Do you physically have access to the router? If so, I would figure out the settings it uses that other people notice (wifi settings etc) and just hard reset it. Chances are they just use the basic settings provided anyway.

Is anybody else using the router or just you? If just you, I'd just do what you want to it and reset it when you leave.

Ipconfig from cmd will tell you the router IP. Go there in your browser.

The router login is usually admin/password or is written on the actual router.

Boom router access and you can do as you please

I’ve tried several different approaches but the ISP locks the root account on the router but will change it to whatever you want if you call as the account holder.

This network is more private and secure and I don’t have to deal with my landlord. They probably wouldn’t be against it but they’re technologically illiterate and this is a better solution in my opinion.

Why do you need to connect over your Landlord's router, for privacy I would recommend using a VPN but I digress.

Anyway, you can just measure your speed/latency to any near server. I would just Ookla's speed test or any game that has that functionality.

40Mbps is not really much so unless the other devices are using the internet connection constantly you are at no risk. You could also limit other devices speed or set QoS so your PC or console has priority.

This is based on my empirical knowledge, so if anyone can correct me please do so.

Mbps is a measurement for bandwidth not latency. However, it's a little confusing what OP wants based on the image alone. The question marks in tandem with the bandwidth values makes me assume OP wants to know their outbound bandwidth but they are clearly asking for latency in the post text.

Yes, but isn't the 40Mbps a bottleneck? If I have 3 devices with Netflix all at 4k (which supposedly uses 25Mbps) while gaming, won't the latency be affected due to the traffic on the line?.

40 Mbps is the amount of data that can be moved in one second; the difference between 20% saturation and 90% saturation should have negligible impact on latency. The bottleneck would occur if you OVERsaturate the line (ie. trying to pull more than 40mbps down) because then the packets would need to take turns coming in and possibly even be re-sent from the source if the latency is so bad that those packets are wiped from cache on routers or switches. (FUN FACT: this is basically how a DDOS attack works, too many packets are being thrown at your network and your router can't say "no" fast enough to the bad data so latency approaches infinity and the good data ends up getting buried as well)

Fast.com (that's Netflix's speed test) also tests loaded latency, which is basically what you're talking about.