WTF is eating my bandwidth

[Vectracious]

OK - so the shop has 9 PC's plus a 2003 server. ADSL 1500/256.

Around about 5pm onwards, the internet gets ridiculously slow. Speedtest.net brings up speeds of about 0.18 Mbps. In the morning, its 1.5Mbps. Our IT people swear its nothing they are uploading that eating up the bandwidth. I've checked all the PC's and cant seem to see anything that's set off to download or upload at this time.

What can I do to find out whats going on?

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[poita]

I have a program called netlimiter, shows every single program that is connecting to the net and what its using

Not 100% but I think you can data log with it

[gmonkey]

check with ur provider might be something with the line or something?? or there might be a cross in your phone line or even theres been reported cases of peak hour traffic effecting phone lines for some reason

does your eftpos update/download at this time perhaps??

[MAD-16V]

Most likely congestion on your exchange - A lot of isp's oversell ports and it causes problems ( most usually from 5 - 7pm onward ) when too many people connect and there is not enough total bandwidth it grinds to a halt.

I had a similar problem with TPG on my home broadband - I called them and got them to move me to a different port - Problem solved.

I would start with your ISP and ask them if they know of any current congestion issues at your local exchange.

[dglewis80]

I'm tipping its the exchange loading up after everyone getting home from work.

Edit - What MAD-16V said....

[gmonkey]

i thought that only really happens on Adsl+ and adsl2+ where its "upto" speeds.. p2 said he has 1.5mbs which "should" be a near solid connection

[Bloodnok]

OK - so the shop has 9 PC's plus a 2003 server. ADSL 1500/256.

Around about 5pm onwards, the internet gets ridiculously slow. Speedtest.net brings up speeds of about 0.18 Mbps. In the morning, its 1.5Mbps. Our IT people swear its nothing they are uploading that eating up the bandwidth. I've checked all the PC's and cant seem to see anything that's set off to download or upload at this time.

What can I do to find out whats going on?

Log the traffic.

Correct place to do that will be the ADSL router. Hopefully you've got one that has some logging or reporting features. It should at least be able to tell you what IP address (i.e. internal machine) is talking to what external host at the current time, if not record a log of historic traffic for you to look at. This functionality may not be exposed on it's web interface, so you may have to go digging.

If your router doesn't have any way of logging the traffic directly, then you'll need to get creative.

Easiest way of doing this is getting a hub (and yes, it has to be a genuine hub, not a switch), and putting it between the router and the network. Then you can connect another PC to this hub, and run Wireshark on it - and it'll tell you exactly what's talking to what...

[gmonkey]

its either any of the above... or its just guy in the alley way looking at porn

[Bloodnok]

i thought that only really happens on Adsl+ and adsl2+ where its "upto" speeds.. p2 said he has 1.5mbs which "should" be a near solid connection

Not so much that - but this is a business, which should mean a business connection, which in theory doesn't suffer the same contention issues at the exchange as a home grade connection.

[dglewis80]

Not so much that - but this is a business, which should mean a business connection, which in theory doesn't suffer the same contention issues at the exchange as a home grade connection.

But if the equipment leading into that exchange is reaching capacity then the whole exchange will slow down.

Had that issue at my last exchange.