Network admins - would you consider this enough bandwidth for the application?

[Sukhoi]

I'm here at the University of Illinois. Our lovely ResNet has only 23 Mbps for ~8,000 students (I believe it's 8,000, but not sure exactly). It's exceedingly slow, and a PITA to go online anymore. Nobody could even get online at the beginning of the year before they blocked all the file sharing programs. Their "solution" is for students to only go online during "off-peak" hours. Well, as you can see from this graph of my dorm, http://www-commeng.cso.uiuc.edu/stats/traffic/week-ISR.gif, the only off-peak hours are around 3:00 A.M.

For those of you who are network admins, do you consider this enough bandwidth for the application?

 

[spidey07]

Circuit looks very healthy. You're barely going past 50%.

Run some pings and tracerts. What applications are experiencing slow response? I'd be willing to bet there is some kind of traffic shaping going on.

 

[Sukhoi]

That graph is just for my dorm, not all of ResNet. Here is the site with the graphs (link to them at the bottom) http://gush.cso.uiuc.edu. I haven't seen a graph of the router that all of ResNet goes through that actually enforces the 23 Mbps cap.

Ping times are fine. I just averaged 39 ms to AT. Tracerts had been running ok until today. For some reason today it's dying on the second hop, and then eventually picking up and finishing the tracert.

I did a speedtest on chi.speakeasy.net and got 2 Mbps, but I think that got screwed up because our backbone goes through Chicago and it's possible Speakeasy is on the same network. I then did a speedtest to nyc.speakeasy.net and got about 150 Kbps. That still seems too fast for how slow these sites are loading (major sites like ESPN, CNN, etc.).

I'm doing a packet loss test on DSLReports now.

 

[Sukhoi]

Here's my lovely packet loss. :|

 

[Tallgeese]

Had a look at the ITR today?

Man, that looks ugly!

 

[Sukhoi]

Wow, that's slow! Lets move to Australia.

 

[Hoober]

Sounds like some sort of traffic shaping on port 80. That would slow down your connection to any major website.

Edit: I need to learn to stop leaving my desk for an hour after I hit the reply button.

 

[stash]

Not sure if you've seen this page, but apparently some dorms have much more geeks than others...

 

[Sukhoi]

Those really aren't good representations. Some of the dorm clusters (like mine, ISR) only have one graph, while others (mostly the 6-pack) have individual graphs for each dorm for some reason.

 

[spidey07]

http://www-commeng.cso.uiuc.edu/stats/traffic/week-NAP.html
looks like your maxing out one of your internet connections beyond belief.

So the answer to your question is - "guess not".

8000 students and faculty? I'd say at least a full T3, probably two or three just to make it healthy. If you're bumping the ceiling with 22 Meg then 45 mbs wouldn't really be enough. mutiples or two OC3s would suffice.

 

[Sukhoi]

Nono, not 8,000 students total. That's just the number of students in the dorms. I believe all total the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has ~35K students including the graduate students.

So I guess it looks like ResNet is getting half a T3 right now. With all the stupid state budget cuts around here I doubt we'll even see a full T3 this year.

Do you think there's anything I could do about this problem since I'm just a freshman, or should I just sit here and live with it?

 

[Santa]

Depends.. the money you spend do you expect fast internet access to do your school work? Do you need it?

If so and the money you spend is definatly warrent for such access or you expect such access then move schools or move out of residence dorms and get your own Inet line.

If you aren't really needing the line to do school work count it as a blessing to not be able to use the internet. It could keep your GPA up

 

[Sukhoi]

If you aren't really needing the line to do school work count it as a blessing to not be able to use the internet. It could keep your GPA up

I've actually thought about that.

Hopefully they'll get some more funding here so we get a bit more bandwidth.

 

[Agamar]

Lol....Here at my college we have 400 staff / faculty and 900 students all sharing a single T1 (1.54Mb/s). Try making that run smooth.

I think we could get better results from getting SDSL or business cable!