Yesterday while the Internet was running really slow for everyone…
I was watching the realtime traffic log, seeing huge intermittent spikes for individual student machines. These spikes last only a few seconds but each spike nails the connection to the wall at or near 100% bandwidth (23 megabit).
None of this is picked up by my Cacti SNMP even with it set to 1 minute polling, or the ISP SNMP logger with 5 minute polling.
Turns out nearly all of these student machines were running some music service I've never heard of called Spotify, plus also the Apple Mobile Device service running at full tilt.
So, as a test, today I have enabled the Packet Shaper in pfSense. Any p2p and unclassified traffic will be throttled to 5% of our total bandwidth. That is still rather generous I think… 5% of 23 meg is 1.15 meg.
Oh, and we also declared that no student may use headphones in class that does not require them, or listen to streaming music or watch streaming music videos in any class. Doing so will result in disciplinary action.
Today's bandwidth has been... a bit less... though this needs more time to see what happens.
(Night of April 2nd I was downloading a service pack on 20 machines at once. I had no problems maxing it out, and the Internet still worked, but slow..)