WAN Links Utilization

5aparada · ‎07-09-2003

When can I consider a wan link is getting high use of bandwitdh, in percentages terms, I mean what is the maximun peak to consider a wan link as high use of bandwidth?

thanks.

rsissons · ‎07-09-2003

There is no definitive answer to this question however, basic queuing theory says that performance will start to decline as the utilisation exceeds 50% and, once 70% is reached it will start to degrade noticably.

On the other hand if your traffic is something like one file transfer in one direction, then it would support higher utilisations without degradation.

abatson · ‎07-10-2003

The util. of any link can be seen under "show interface XXX" Depending on the IOS, you'll see a Tx and Rx value for utill, that's on a scale of 0-255 with 255 being 100%. Watch for these numbers to approach 255 in either direction. A point-to-point DS1 is a full-duplex connection; you can send 1.544Mbit of data in both directions at once, as evidenced by using MRTG to monitor bandwidth. Otherwise, it may take some time & experimentation to see exactly at what point a given link starts getting shaky...

-alex