Npad

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. NPAD is the Network Path and Application Diagnosis project, which provides free software that analyzes the performance of end-to-end computer network paths. NPAD is typically used to determine why performance is poor along a given path through a computer network. To use NPAD, one has to direct a web browser to one of the "NPAD Diagnostic Servers". This causes a client applet to start on the local computer. The client applet will then ask the user for some desired performance parameters and test the TCP performance of the network path between the client and the NPAD diagnostic server. The result is a report that shows the measurements collected during the test and a pass/fail analysis of the measurements. If the quality of the path is too low to support the desired performance parameters, the report will give the path a failing grade. Each time a test is run, a new report is created and stored on the NPAD server in the form of a web page. Each report contains links to "help pages" that describe the meaning of measurements and the algorithms used to analyze them.