RWIC I-1 Bandwidth

A web-based experiment (#2)

This page was last modified on December 6, 2004.
Graphs update every 15 minutes

Fig. 1: Past 24 hours worth of data.

Fig. 2: Past weeks' worth of data.

The purpose of this experiment was to monitor and visualize the available Internet-1 bandwidth available at the Regional Weather Information Center. The graph represents the bandwidth available to one instance of one program running on one computer, NOT the total bandwidth available to the entire facility.

A crontab triggers a script that calls the wget command to retrieve a 10k file from an Internet-1 website every 15 minutes. The download speed reported by wget is filtered through some shell scripts and a C program, and finally plotted using Ploticus.

The graph shows the effect of traffic shaping done at the boundary between the UND campus and the rest of Internet-1.

This experiment places an average daily load of 91 bits per second on the UND I-1 link. Given that the link is currently (12-7-2004) capped at 35 Mbps, the experiment is consuming 2.6E-4 (0.00026) percent of the maximum available bandwidth. In other words, it doesn't have any appreciable impact on the quantity it's testing, or any other users or applications.