Lab: Network baseline with iperf3 and ping

This lab captures a network baseline using iperf3 and ping. By the end you will have the data to detect future network regressions.

Tasks

Task 1: Latency baseline

ping -c 100 <remote-host> | tee /tmp/latency.txt

Capture the average, min, max, and standard deviation.

Task 2: TCP bandwidth

iperf3 -c <remote-host> -t 30 -i 5 -J > /tmp/iperf-tcp.json

Capture: bitrate, retransmits.

Task 3: UDP at various bitrates

iperf3 -c <remote-host> -u -b 100M -t 30 -J > /tmp/iperf-udp-100m.json
iperf3 -c <remote-host> -u -b 500M -t 30 -J > /tmp/iperf-udp-500m.json
iperf3 -c <remote-host> -u -b 1G -t 30 -J > /tmp/iperf-udp-1g.json

For each: bitrate, jitter, packet loss.

Task 4: Reverse direction

iperf3 -c <remote-host> -R -t 30 -J > /tmp/iperf-reverse.json

Task 5: Parallel streams

iperf3 -c <remote-host> -P 4 -t 30 -J > /tmp/iperf-parallel.json

Task 6: Document

NETWORK BASELINE
================
Hosts: <host-a> to <host-b>
Date: 2026-08-09

Latency:
- min: 0.123 ms
- avg: 0.156 ms
- max: 0.234 ms
- mdev: 0.045 ms
- loss: 0%

TCP bandwidth (single stream):
- 935 Mbits/sec
- 0 retransmits

TCP bandwidth (4 parallel streams):
- 2.8 Gbits/sec aggregate

UDP at 100M:
- 100 Mbits/sec
- 0% loss
- jitter 0.012 ms

UDP at 1G:
- 850 Mbits/sec
- 8% loss
- jitter 0.234 ms

Reverse direction:
- 920 Mbits/sec
- 0 retransmits