CDN-Perf

A project for a course titled "Measuring Internet Performance". The focus is on comparing the performance characteristics of websites such as YouTube to that of the servers which deliver their actual content.

Requirements

Ubuntu

• sudo apt-get build-essential traceroute tcpdump python3-dev python3-pip
• pip install -r requirements.txt (virtual environment suggested: link)
• Ensure that tcpdump has permissions to access network device: instructions (N.B. requires reboot after the steps are complete)
• Ensure traceroute has permissions to send ICMP packets: sudo chmod u+s `which traceroute` and similarly for ping if necessary.

Windows

• WinDump installed or in the current directory
• [Python 3] (https://www.python.org/downloads/)
• pip install -r requirements.txt (virtual environment suggested: link)

Python modules

The tests were run with the following version of each module (should the tests need to be replicated):

• psutil==4.3.0
• requests==2.11.1
• youtube-dl==2016.8.13

To run

• source <path_to_virtual_environment>/bin/activate if using a virtual environment
• Ensure all the URLs of the videos you want to test are in a text file (see urls.txt for an example)
• python cdn_perf.py <path_to_urls_file>

Output

• A file data-<timestamp>.csv will be created which contains all test results.