Testing and benchmarking your network

These are essential tests that can be carried out to troubleshoot network problems. You can also use some of these advanced techniques to benchmark your network.

Basic tests

The simplest way to check whether you are connected to the Internet is to ping a remote address.

Note

The following tests were carried out over Wi-Fi to not only test the reliability of the Wi-Fi connection but to also achieve the best stability; it is always recommended that you use an Ethernet connection. These examples demonstrate the various bottlenecks that you may encounter when using Wi-Fi.

We can ping http://www.google.com, but we can also use shorthand and an easy-to-remember IP address, such as 8.8.8.8, which is Google's public DNS server. This IP address will resolve to the nearest Google DNS server in your area, and even if it goes down, there are many backup servers, making this a reliable test:

ping -c 1 google.com
ping -c 1 8.8.8.8

A ping can help you determine whether...