Super-Networking Blog

Do you need something to monitor the bandwidth usage on one server? For instance if you have a hosted server that has limited total usage. Well if you want a simple free tool download NetMeter.

You can get real time statistics, totals including day, week and month. It will also project your usage over the day, week or month based off what you have already used. It is easy to use and best of all FREE!

So this is a follow-up post to Latency Vs. Bandwidth where I gave a good link to an explanation on the differences between the problem of Latency and Bandwidth on the Internet. The same blogger had a follow-up post that explained a few ways for you to help improve high latencies.

This is another good article that goes over some of the things you can do to mitigate latency problems. I am going to go through a couple of things on this topic myself:

“Tweaking the host TCP settings” was one of his things to try and I agree that if you do it right this can help a great deal but if you tweak it wrong it can make things a whole lot worse. Be sure to test it in a lab before doing anything in production. Also another FYI on this method is that Windows Vista auto tunes your network setting so you are better off just letting it make the changes unless you have major problems.

Another method that he brings up is to move mission critical Internet web pages or downloads to a CDN network. This is a great idea but be wary of the price that this can cost you. There are a lot of them out that and some are cost effective and some are not. I did a mini review of some of the choices here.

Another thing you can do that should help is if you have an application that needs to stay in your datacenter and you need to get it cross county under a maximum latency is work with your ISP. Most of the time your traffic will switch through multiple ISPs between your datacenter and theirs if it is a long distance away. This can cause major increases in your latency.

A couple of ways to mitigate this is to possibly switch your ISP to the same ISP as the business you need to work with. If it is a lower bandwidth need you could get a point to point link, or if it needs to be a higher bandwidth connection you should look at the possibility of getting a MPLS tunnel from end to end through your ISP.

One more tip which doesn’t really relate to Latency but will help if you are wondering why your transfers are so slow over a large pipe. Use parallel transfers, if you have large amounts of data to transfer over long distances either program it in or find a programs that running multiple streams at the same time. You will find a huge increase in throughput.

There are a thousand ways to look at this but hopefully between the post from the EdgeBlog and my posts you can get a lot of options.

I ran across a pretty good read today that explains the problem with latency on WAN networks. The first part starts out saying that a lot of IT managers do not understand that just throughing more bandwidth at a problem won’t solve all your problems. This might be true of IT manager’s but all Network Administrators/Engineers better know this. This is a simple concept and it one of the reasons why Sattelite Internet hasn’t taken off, latency is a killer.

Check out the article here

It is really getting interesting on the bandwidth structures available to web based companies now. Amazon’s S3 service is lowering their prices even more than before, they were cheap at $0.20/GB transfer. It is getting to the point where even with a screaming deal on an unlmited transfer plan with a capped Mbps transfer you might want to make the switch.

With some plans you can get unlimited transfer but you can say use 100Mbps at any one time for a flat monthly rate. This can seem like a good deal when you are doing a lot of constant trasfer where you aren’t going to go over the 100Mbps and are just doing a lot of data. The thing is you are capped for high traffic times and no matter if your traffic goes up, stays the same, or goes down you are getting charged the same amount. So when you are doing 90Mbps everyday it is a good deal but when you are doing 10Mbps it becomes a waste of money.

So you look at an option based on GB transfer and they will charge you monthly depending on how my transfer you do. Benefit here if your traffic goes up, hopefully are making more money, the bill goes up but if your traffic goes way down so will the bill. You aren’t tieing yourself to a flat rate you might not be using. The thing in the past was that with GB transfer costs of $1.50/GB, that you find with some CDN networks and a more average $0.50/GB, you are just coming out a lot higher on the cost than with the flat rate. Now with Amazon’s less than $0.20/GB you need to relook at your contracts. Might be time to make the switch.

There are pricing changes coming to Amazon’s S3 service. I know most of the time you think price change, oh no I guess they are going up. Not in this case.

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007) $0.20 / GB - uploaded $0.20 / GB - downloaded New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007) $0.10 per GB - all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded

$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded

$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)

$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests

$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

Storage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.

The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers� March 2007 usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

Thanks to Jeff for the info.

Here is an older post of mine on Amazon S3’s service.