bandwidth hogs

[Eric]

Other then Internet Radio and Video, are there any other Internet
services I should be aware of that are bandwidth hogs. Can I easily
block or restrict access to any of the hogs through my firewall,
router, policies, groups, etc.

One of my users in a remote office has no performance issues running
AutoCad 2004 over our VPN and accessing our central file server in our
HQ, before 7:00 a.m.

But by lunch he's slowing to a crawl and has to cease working.

I'm going to swap the hub out for a switch in the remote office. I'm
also going to put my servers in our HQ on their own switch and plug
them into gigabit ports. They currently are on the same switch as the
HQ office LAN.

So that will leave me with identifying and restricting covert
bandwidth hogs.

The remote office is DSL so I cannot monitor their bandwidth usage.
I've got a T1 at the hq, so I'm going to start getting weekly usage
reports. Are there any performance monitor tools I can use at the LAN
level to measure peak network traffic periods and even what apps are
using generating the most traffic?

Thanks,
Eric

 

[Phillip Windell]

Other then Internet Radio and Video, are there any other Internet

Those aren't that bad. That are just the false impressions people have of
them. The worst is just simply a straight old every-day File Transfer.
Copying a file will grab all the bandwidth it can and will run as fast as it
can until it is finished.

 

[Eric]

We stopped Internet Radio listening and it's made a dramatic
improvement to the network performance of the user in question.

 

[Phillip Windell]

Compare that to a large file transfer. Get him to start copyng a large file
that takes considerable time,...then while that is going try to do other
things on the web from his same machine,...it will be worse than it was with
the "radio" running. The "radio" only transfers at the bitrate that the
audio was encoded at because that is the speed that the "player" will read
and play it at. But a file transfer will simply grab all it can get.

 

[Eric]

What exactly do you define as 'large'? 0.10 meg, 1.0 meg, 10.0 meg?

I'm figuring large is based on the amount of time the transfer takes,
which should be a function of the size of the file. The larger the
file, the longer the transfer, and so the larger the impact on the
network from another user's point of view.

In addition, it would seem to me that file transfer is discrete in
that it has a definite beginning and end. Internet radio is a
continous load on the network.

Are there any ways to mitigate the behavior you describe?

The users' are not normally doing explicit file transfers. However,
their applications are moving data (files) back and forth during the
day. The file sizes usually range from 100k to 400k.

I'm planning on setting up shop in the remote office for a week and
monitoring the network usage. I hope to be able to examine periods of
peak bandwidth usage and figure out who and what is the cause.

Thanks,
Eric

 

[Phillip Windell]

Since you didn't quote the message you're replying to, so I do not know if
you are replying to a message I wrote on this. I don't keep old thread
headers more than a couple days. But anyway....

What exactly do you define as 'large'? 0.10 meg, 1.0 meg, 10.0 meg?

Grab a CD insert it into a shared drive on another machine in the
network,...start copying to whole thing to your local hardrive from across
the network. After it starts copying, try to access network resources,
internet websites, or whatever. You will find that this will slow everything
down much more than a user listening to an Internet radio would do.

In addition, it would seem to me that file transfer is discrete in
that it has a definite beginning and end. Internet radio is a
continous load on the network.

Being continuous isn't relevant. It is the "volume" of traffic "at the
moment" that matters. Streaming Audio that is encoded at 96kbps or 64kbps
will only use 96 or 64 kbps of bandwith because the Decoder that plays it
will only "take it in" at the same rate that it "plays it" once is fills the
initial buffer. That is a miniscule portion of bandwith.

I'm not advocating having everyone listening to Internet Radios, I don't
want them doing it here either, but I am only trying to put it in
perspective so you "point the finger" at the right guilty item, and not
waste time trying to solve the right problem in the wrong place.

The users' are not normally doing explicit file transfers. However,
their applications are moving data (files) back and forth during the
day. The file sizes usually range from 100k to 400k.

Then they are doing explicit file transfers,..they just don't know it. If
many users running the App are transfering data (same as a file transfer),
and would be overlapping each other and maybe even some are
simultaneous,...then you have the condition I am speaking of. This descibes
the Network "overhead" of that partucular Application which will climb with
the number of users who are using the App at the same time.