Network quality and it’s correlation with bandwidth usage and numbers of packets in SETURAN12

Before continue reading this, I would like to remind you that the resulted images are solely for diagnosing purpose only, and is very subjective, since network quality is affected by many of factors.

The purpose of this post is to remind myself (just in case I got amnesia), the correlation of ping replies with bandwidth usage & packets count in pfSense 1.2 gateway.

One of the features in pfSense is RRD Graph, which graphs important information, such as bandwidth usage, CPU load, memory consumption, network (ping) quality, number of packets, and queues(if you’re utilizing Traffic shaper).

I would like to focus on network quality. These graphs basically just time based graph of ping replies to ISP gateway(s). The slower the ping responses, the higher the number on Y coordinate. 1 cell in X coordinate, correspond to 1 day.

As I stare this graph below, I notice some repetitive occurence/pattern:

Oh, forgot to mention, Week 39 and Week 40 are excluded, since we have
different modem and connection mode. Starting at week 41, I used Bridge
Mode in my ADSL modem, and a change from DHCP mode to PPPoE mode in pfSense’s WAN.

Pay attention on week 42 and 43. The quality starts to crumble down on weekend, starting at wednesday, usually at midnight. It’s getting worse when it gets to sunday, and they usually happen during midnight until the next day.

This week (week 43) it starts even ealier, in Tuesday , starting at around 10 pm and all the way to 5 am this morning.

Hmmmm, what is this? Let’s bring the bandwidth usage, see if anything similar occur here:

It seem that the correlation is (almost) linear, the higher the bandwidth usage, the data rush definetely hammered the network ping replies

Let see the packet graph:

Yes, we did see the same correlation. The higher the packet count per second, the higher the ping result

CONCLUSION: There is a linear correlation between pfSense Network Quality , Bandwidth Usage and Packet Count.

I hope this result will bring some lights to my customers of how their ISP is doing.

Cheers.