This afternoon, I decided to look at the firewall to make sure that the link to the backup ISP was working properly. It was. While I was poking around, I noticed that both T-1 links were maxed out. That didn’t seem right.
I looked at the connections monitor, and found that most of the traffic was going to the very computer I was using. That was even stranger; I wasn’t doing any downloads, and I didn’t have any unusual webpages open. I got the IP address of the other end of the connection, and did a whois on it; it was Dropbox.
That was not an explanation, but it gave me something to work on. I had not added any Dropbox files on any machine connected to the Dropbox account in several days. I did have some directories shared with other people that I’d set up for short-term use. I’d left them there out of inertia. I deleted them and the traffic stopped.
Problem solved, right? Well, yes, for now. But the whole thing got me thinking. These ad hoc shared transfers that I’d been using more or less like an ftp client/server relationship, had bandwidth consequences, causing traffic to all my shared devices whether I needed the data on them or not. I made a mental note to be more careful with shared folders in the future, and to use a real ftp server if I were dealing with large files that just had to be moved from point A to point B.
Then I started thinking more broadly. I’m on the board of a local school, and act as a technical consultant to the IT staff. One of the problems that we’re dealing with, now that smart phones and tablets have become ubiquitous, is allocation of our limited network bandwidth to various users and uses. It occurs to me that Dropbox and similar traffic should probably be given low priority, and perhaps throttled. Most people don’t use Dropbox so that they’re waiting in real time for the synchronization to take place, and Dropbox traffic shouldn’t therefore delay interactive web traffic.
There are whole host of cloud-based software products that either exist to offer synchronization across devices or offer that feature while they are delivering a related service. It’s difficult for the user to figure out what the bandwidth implications of using the software are. I’m thinking of the problem as it relates to performance, but, if you have a network connection with a usage cap, it might affect your bill.
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