Bandwidth to a Website Question

HI,

I have an issue that I have no experience in. My company runs a website and is currently running a 1mbps shared pipe to that website. We are looking to increase this due to some national exposure and media coverage. We are currently looking to get an on demand 2 mbps pipe for the site due to this. What I am trying to determine is, how big a pipe do we need? Can anyone out there give me an approximate for the number of hits a 2mbps pipe can handle?

I know this cannot be exact but an idea would be very helpful. The website is an e-commerce website with product pictures and graphics.

Thanks for any advice that can be provided.

Reply to
K.J. 44
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no - depends on page data size, acceptable response times.

however the other rule of thumb is that it is pointless upgrading unless you at least double the bandwidth if you want a significant improvement.

i suggest you measure the bandwidth use now over a period, and the number of hits - then scale up.

you should assume that loading the pipe to 100% is a really bad idea since the delay involved gets very long - 50% load is a good target.

if you can get an Ethernet link with a software limited rate (ie 10Mbps or

100 Mbps tail, but limited to 2 Mbps initially), then you would be able to alter the bandwidth at fairly short notice if it turns out your site is more popular than expected.
Reply to
stephen

If you are not able to provision adequately in advance, one thing to consider is the behaviour under overload. In some cases you can end up with no users getting any service at all. The whole thing just melts. Usually it would be best to somehow manage it so that at lease some users do get service.

The worst thing would be for example for users to get through putting in all their details only for the site to crap out losing the data.

For example you might limit the number of active connections on your server.

Another thing is to consider reducing the queue size in the router. BTW I have not tried the following! but is seems a good idea.

By default for example routers queue maybe 1 or 2 seconds of data. This means that when the link gets full ALL of the traffic is delayed by

1 or 2 seconds. On an interactive site this can destroy the user experience. You are going to be dropping traffic anyway so why make the trafic that does get through wait for 2 seconds?
Reply to
Bod43

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