I'm preparing for a load test of a classroom wifi system. The pupils all turn on their laptops at the start of the lesson, which launches the web browser and then they start the lesson - which involves downloading a flash based lesson (from a server within the school), generally half to 2 MB download.
In some cases, the load time is stretching to 5 or 10 minutes. So I want to monitor all parts of the system to say with confidence where the bottlenecks are, and how many clients can use a single wifi access point reasonably. So we are planning to run tests with up to 50 clients and see what happens (I know that most people recommend 20-25 clients per access point, but the client wants to test this - and I want to get good data to show the client one way or another).
I already know how to monitor the server. The wifi access point supports SNMP, and seems to provide quite a lot of variables, but I don't want to have to wade through too much.
So the question is, what wifi-related variables are the key ones to monitor to characterise when the system is getting overloaded, clients are waiting, collisions are happening etc?
I'm happy to be told the generic names for what should be there and hunt through the files myself, but if you want/need to see the details, then the access point we are using is the Ubiquity Nanostation 2. The MIB files for Ubiquity products are linked from the bottom of their SNMP page. Though I also found that they seem to support at least part of the Mikrotik MIB.