PacketShaper Graphs

This first graph shows the average rate of incoming traffic for the two months from 15-Apr-01 to 16-Jun-01. Geoff's servers moved out on 28-Apr-01, but as you'll note, the average incoming traffic rate doesn't change all that much afterwards because inbound HTTP requests (the blue) are extremely small, leaving primarily inbound SMTP (green) traffic composed of Adam's mail. The two spikes of inbound FTP data (magenta) came from downloading 20+ MB Web logs.

This next graph is much more striking, because it shows the average rate of outbound traffic. It's easy to see when Geoff took his servers back on 28-Apr-01, and at that point almost all outbound HTTP traffic (blue), outbound POP3 traffic (green), and outbound FTP traffic (magenta) ceased. The HTTP traffic came from our Web database services, the POP3 traffic from Geoff picking up his email, and the FTP traffic from automation that uploads changed files to our primary Web server. Note that outbound SMTP (orange) dropped only a little - Geoff's servers don't send much mail compared to TidBITS Talk and the TidBITS translations (the TidBITS Talk digest and translations account for most of the large outbound SMTP spikes).

In the third graph we move from looking at average rate to the peak rate, incoming in this case. Note that the Y-axis goes to 240 Kbps, well above the maximum possible with my 56 Kbps connection. This is a graphical artifact of the way the PacketShaper records the data - it's adding up the peak rate of each service. Again, with inbound traffic, the effect of Geoff's servers isn't particularly noticeable, because the incoming peak rate for any slice of time doesn't change much with additional traffic. The large inbound POP3 (yellow) spike on 24-May-01 was Tonya retrieving hundreds of queued messages after a week-long trip.

Finally, this last graph shows the outgoing peak rate, where you can see even more clearly that the additional traffic from Geoff's servers was maxing out the connection, with outbound FTP (magenta), HTTP (blue), and SMTP (orange) each peaking at or near the maximum throughput of the 56 Kbps connection. POP3 (green), in contrast, peaked much lower - it simply wasn't as demanding. After Geoff's servers left, you can see how the remaining outgoing traffic used the connection - a little outbound HTTP and FTP that never peaked particularly high, and a lot of demanding outbound SMTP for TidBITS Talk and the translations.