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Performance Enhancement and Response Team

The PERT is a conceptual team that provides assistance with the resolution of end-to-end performance problems for networked applications and contributes to research in the area of end-to-end performance issues.

Since 2004 SWITCH offers this consulting service to its customers who need support in resolving network performance problems that they cannot solve on their own.

The SWITCH PERT . . .

• accepts reports about network performance problems
• analyzes the end-to-end network situation
• collects necessary information from different sources such as
  • the reporting user
  • other users of the distributed application
  • system administrators / network operators along the path
• finds potential areas for improvement
• coordinates efforts to improve the situation
• builds a knowledge base in co-operation with the GÉANT eduPERT
• publishes best practice guides in co-operation with eduPERT
• disseminates knowledge
• operates servers that allow network speed tests to the SWITCH backbone

PERT contact information

Useful prerequisites

To start an investigation on a performance issue it is very useful if you could us provide with the following information:

• Description of the observed problem
• Performance expectations and/or requirements
• Measurements results if available
• Name and IP-address of the hosts involved
• Traceroute output between source and destination host to show the path
• Used application, traffic type (TCP, UDP)
• ideally pcap packet traces
• Operating system of the local system and if available from the remote host

Network Diagnostic Tester

To allow you to test the speed of your connection to the SWITCH network, we have deployed a gigabit-connected web server in our backbone. It's called NDT server (Network Diagnostic Tester) and you can access it at:

http://ndt.switch.ch.
(more information about NDT can be found on http://e2epi.internet2.edu/ndt).

This tool uses a Java applet to perform the tests. Therefore Java has to be installed on your machine and has to be enabled in your browser.
The results of the tests show the achieved TCP throughput to/from our server and some more details about network/host limitations.
On a Linux machine you can also use the command line tool web100clt, which does not require a Java installation. After downloading web100clt you can run it with
'web100ctl -n ndt.switch.ch'.

Further Reading

• eduPERT Knowledge Base