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Where The Bandwidth Goes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the saturating-the-ether dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An often overlooked fact about network bandwidth utilization is that the bandwidth consumed on networks is more than the sum of the data exchanged at the highest level; it's data+overhead+upkeep. In the early 90's I worked for a large multi-national company whose software engineering department had a transatlantic x.25 circuit connection to it's European engineering headquarters. It was necessary that the connection be 'on' 24x7 due to the spanning of a large number of time zones, disparate working hours and tight contractual requirements. Very large data transfers were sometimes operationally essential. But the financial people used to scream constantly about the circuit costs (charged per packet, IIRC) of several thousand dollars/month. The sys admin realized that if he just reduced the frequency of keep-alives, he could shave something like 10% off the monthly bill. This article points out that p2p applications are greater bandwidth hogs than one might think because of the foregoing and more - they also search, accept pushed advertising and do other transactions that are transparent to most users, but add up. I doubt that developers of those free p2p applications have gave much thought to efficiency. This will be no surprise to many of you, but helps explain why ISP's rushing to put caps on transfers."

4 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. This has been known for a long time... by fortinbras47 · · Score: 5, Informative
    With gnutella, QueryHit packets can make up as little as 1% of traffic (by numbers of packets, not size) while Ping and Pong packets can be well over 50% of packets. Check out this article to see more detail.

    Gnutella is not one of the more advanced protocols, but most of it's problems are present at varying levels in other p2p systems. It's not really surprising that P2P software which spends so much time trying to connect to computers, connect to a computer to start a download etc... and search in a geometric spiderring fashion are quite inefficient.

  2. Re:Text compresses by EnderWiggnz · · Score: 5, Informative

    no, there arent better solutions.

    as i stated earlier, go to google and look at the source - one letter field names, and no line breaks.

    why? TO SAVE BANDWIDTH.

    every byte is sacred... every byte is great...

    and if a byte is wasted, CFO's get quite irate...

    --
    ... hi bingo ...
  3. Re:compression by ShaunC · · Score: 4, Informative
    It would simply be a matter of Apache and IIS supporting it
    Apache does support it, it's called mod_gzip and Slashdot already uses it. The IIS equivalent (sort of) is called PipeBoost.

    Shaun
    --
    Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
  4. Efficient search in peer networks by PureFiction · · Score: 4, Informative

    I doubt that developers of those free p2p applications have gave much thought to efficiency

    Some of us have. Search is much of the bandwidth in peer networks is wasted (downloads are downloads, but search can eat up a lot of bandwidth for little return)

    There are some efficient, effective peer network search apps currently in development. Hopefully we can eventually leave gnutella and kazaa in the past and move on to more open, efficient networks...