Slow Internet
 Today’s title takes on double meaning. My webhost has had my sites down for a few days. Lucky for me the outage came on the day I was celebrating my 200th cartoon. My stats obviously suffered on a day I should have had great numbers. I had several real cartoonist sending notifications of my 2ooth toon to their readers. Then these readers were created by a dead page. 
They have the problems “fixed” they say, but there is still some serious delay in loading pages. I had this toon ready to publish last night but could not reach the admin page to do the actual post. I’d switch webhosts but the amount of planning and execution do move my site would require more time than I have right now.
   Back to the cartoon. Here at work we have many many computers and we all share a T1. If people do simple surfing or email the T1 is just fine for us. Where we run into trouble is from streaming of audio/video and other things. One of the biggest bandwidth hogs I’ve seen lately is when folks upload photos to Facebook, and they seem to do this a lot. It’s not like these people do these things to be selfish, they just are not aware of the impact they have on others. I have mentioned all of this in past email, but I get the feeling my emails go over like Charlie Brown’s teacher voice. I don’t really care where people go online, I let the filters keep the worst sites awya, but they just cannot affect everyone else. Someday in the future I hope we can add to our bandwidth and make it possible for people to do whatever they want. Until then I just ask my users to do their heavy usage early in the day, lunch time, or at the end of the day. I don’t think that is unreasonable. I don’t want to block Facebook because I think it is a great tool for the staff to keep up with each other’s lives. In a few weeks I’ll be addressing the staff in our monthly all-staff meeting on all of this, so wish me luck.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Three letters for you Barry: Q.O.S. Let ‘em hit FB, Twitter, Hulu, YouTube and the like all they want, just throttle those connections down so they only chew up xx% of the bandwidth.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Matt, we are supposed to be able to do that with our gateway, but seems the feature is still in the “testing” phase. You are right when we can do that we will be golden. We do have that for our DIY hotspot gateway.