I currently have a set-up where my HTPC can sadly only be connected to the network by wireless. My apartment building is full of wireless signals, but I have managed to find a relatively quiet bandwidth to create a stable transfer rate, quick enough to stream HD movies.
But I have a problem and don't know how to properly debug. Until I do I will keep guessing if it is just inherent lack of reliability of a wireless connection or that there are other problems. If I stream or when I use VNC to control my HTPC, there are lapses in speed. During streaming this occurs after 10 minutes or so, where suddenly the playback starts stuttering, I assume due to slower transfer speeds. Using VNC there will be moments where it will be almost unusably slow, but the connection will not be dropped. This happens even though the used bandwidth is not even close to the bandwidth used when playing back HD video. I have also noticed that network file transfers tend to slow over time when using WLAN.
I'd like to have detailed information about transfer speeds per connection on the WLAN, so I can track what connections are active during these drops in speed and measure exactly the bandwidth used over the WLAN, total and by connection. Is there any shell program I can use that will create a simple stdout entry every second or so? I don't need anything fancy, just connection info, timestamp and bandwidth should be enough.
