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Why is the Internet Slow January 30, 2008

Posted by Alex in : Internet , add a comment

When I came to Collegiate in 2001, we had a T1 Connection to the Internet. That’s 1.54 Mbps. 1,540,000 Million Bits per second. Lots has changed since then. The Internet started as text based pages, then added images and now video is the norm. In the fall of 2005 we moved to a 10 Mbps Metro LAN connection.

So with a 10 megabit per second connection, why do we experience slow downs?

We have a network with 275 machines, any of which can be streaming audio, downloading video or large pictures, or just browsing the web. If a few community members start downloading videos or large files from any number of video sites at the same time, this overtaxes our Internet connection, causing everyone else to slow down. You can see an example on the graph below between 11 and 12am:

internet

What is the Technology Department doing?

We closely monitor our Internet connection as you can see by the graph above. Last year, we added a proxy server which increases Internet performance by storing frequently used web sites on a local server.

Yesterday, we changed two things:

  1. We gave higher priority to Collegiate Connect traffic
  2. We also reconfigured our proxy server to enable balancing of Internet video traffic by using a function called delay pools.

From a few anecdotal comments today, web sites do appear to be loading faster.

What can you do?

First of all, please be aware of your Internet use. Internet video and downloading large files tax our Internet connection the most. If you are browsing a video site or downloading large files and they are not related to your work, please do this outside of the school day.

If you notice Internet slow downs, please send me (aragone [at]collegiateschool.org) an e-mail. Here are our criteria for a slow down:

  1. You go to a site and you get a Page Not Displayed or a Page Timed Out message and when you refresh, you receive this again (or you receive multiple Page Not Displayed or a Page Timed Out during a given work day)
  2. Your page takes longer than 10 seconds to load.

Please provide us with the following information:

Thanks so much for your patience and feedback as we attempt to provide you with better service.