Where I'm employed we have a massive network consisting of 6 nodes- 4 computers and 2 printers. All nodes are in the same workgroup and all run XP- 3 Pros and 1 Home. I would be the webmaster, chief cook and bottle washer. The issue we're having is that when I download/upload (especially upload) large files to our webserver it pretty much kills network performance in general- everything really slows to a crawl. I'm performing and ever increasing number of download/upload operations in a day so this is really starting to become an problem. Our current broadband service is 3Mbs download/256Kbs upload. I'm hoping we can upgrade to 5Mbs download/768Kbs upload in a couple of days, but that may or may not happen. My question is simple- what would be the best way to fix this issue? Would creating subnets and placing my machine on one of them help? Would a gigbit switch and NICs help? Equipment wise, we have already have an extra router, cabling, etc. at our disposal. Knowledge wise, I don't know the best way to fix this problem but hopefully I should be able to implement a solution. Feel free to let me know if more information is needed. If anyone has any pearls of wisdom they would be most welcome- thanks!

We had a similar problem in our office after it doubled in size. Only 3mb dsl connections are available & we couldn't shell out hundreds of dollars for a t1 & we'd still need a load balancer. I ended up putting together a custom box running freebsd & we got 2 (later 3) DSL connections & load balanced the office between them. It's really doing two things: 1) Source routing hosts by IP, so i.e.: each department get assigned to one of the 3 links & the bandwidth is shared in that pool. 2) Queue managing traffic so if one host is taking up all the bandwidth, other ppl's traffic still gets through. Since you've only got 4 workstations, you could probably just get away w/ queue management on one line (might upgrade to the 5mb anyway) FreeBSD or linux can do this, under FreeBSD you can use IPFW's dummynet for queue management. The dummynet setup wasn't too hard, but the above-mentioned link load balancing was more difficult. You can buy prebuilt systems to do this too, The old Alteon's do this nicely, the new ones (Nortel-branded) are over-kill, cisco also sells some stuff too. Good luck.

Thanks for the quick reply! We actually have cable instead of DSL (something I should have made clear) and I'm thinking we'll be restricted to one connection for awhile. Something I'm not sure I understand- when you state: "1) Source routing hosts by IP, so i.e.: each department get assigned to one of the 3 links & the bandwidth is shared in that pool." are you talking about subnetting? I'd like to run Linux in our office- the constant Windows updates, rebooting, the virus/spyware deal- is expensive and a pain. I've got a Slackware box setup to evaluate software we might use but we're not quite ready to roll out Linux just yet- it will be XP for a little while longer.

Well, yes and no, we did have to break the hosts into subnets by department, but that by itself didn't do antyhing. It was just for making forwarding rules like: forward 10.0.0.64/28 to LINK1 forward 10.0.0.80/28 to LINK2 That is, 10.0.0.64/28 (decimal subnet mask: 255.255.255.240) represents IP addresses 10.0.0.0.64-79, 10.0.0.80/28 means: 10.0.0.80 - 10.0.0.95 Subnetting is just breaking up networks like that, read about CIDR & subnetting But the network itself is still 10.0.0.0/24 (.0-255) so all the hosts are on the same subnet. With only 6 nodes, breaking them up into their own subnets wouldn't do anything - the bottleneck is still your gateway. And I ment putting linux on a computer for use as a router - not as a workstation. A box w/ two network cards, which will be your gateway. It's a cheap alternative to buying a higher-end router that can do queue management. Because, i.e., the reason one host takes up all your bandwidth is because you allow it. There's pre-build packages too, just google for 'linux router', or I've heard alot about m0n0wall Look at the screenshots there - Traffic shaper - pipes & queues. You setup a 'pipe' w/ the amount of bandwidth & attach a queue. If everybody is in the same 'queue', then they're balanced evenly. So if one host is taking up a large amount of the traffic, the other hosts will still be guaranteed that their traffic will get through. It'll slow down the internet use, but it won't come to a halt. It's called Traffic shaping, you just need a better router that can do it. It comes down to building one, or buying one for load balancing / upgrading your internet connection.

Well, you given me a lot to research and think about, not to mention an education. Thanks again!

The first question should have been: What is your present bandwidth on your network? 10 Mpbs, 100 Mbps? In any case, unless you're already running at 1000 Mbps, upgrading your entire network to 1 Gig would make a huge difference. Unless you're a UNIX guru, FreeBSD is going to be an issue. If you don't know it yourself, or at least know the basics and are able to figure out the rest, you're going to have to hire someone to build and administer your load balancing boxes. Not that it's a bad idea, we use teamed (for redundancy) OpenBSD boxes for firewalls where I work. It's just that the learning curve on them is a little larger than windows or specific network devices. The same goes for Alteon's. We're presently deploying a bunch of those in our WAN environment so we can enable BGP, unless you know your way around them, again, you'll need to hire someone who does. My best recommendation to you would be to first upgrade your network and see if that doesn't fix the bandwidth issue. If it doesn't, the next thing I would look at would be a managed switch, preferably a Layer 3 switch so you won't require a separate router, and using VLAN tagging and segmenting your network with different subnets (VLAN's).