Traffic expands to fill the bandwidth provided

Pilot fish works at a small-but-growing startup where the staff is mostly composed of under-30-year-olds.

"We kept going through this cycle of hiring new people and then everyone would start complaining that the Internet was slow for the office," says fish. "So the manager would order the office Internet provider to up the rate."

The first time, the rate gets pushed up to 15GB -- and the problem seems to go away.

But the next week, employees are complaining about Internet performance again.

Once again, the manager asks the Internet provider to increase the rate -- this time to 30GB.

A week later people are complaining again.

This time, the manager starts running network analysis tools to see if the complaints are justified. To his surprise, he finds that the office really is using that much bandwidth, so he orders the bandwidth up to 45GB.

And in short order, people are complaining that it's slow again.

That triggers a more detailed analysis of the network traffic. What's using so much bandwidth in an office of 50 employees when the servers are all located elsewhere? "He was expecting to find that the traffic between the servers and the office was causing the problem," fish says.

"It turns out that every time he announced that we were going to have faster Internet, more people decided to listen to music over the Internet through their headphones and watch HD videos at lunch time.

"The manager ordered that this stop in the office. Miraculously, everyone now has fast connections for work-related activities."

Connect with Sharky. Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a stylish Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

The Best of Shark Tank includes more than 70 tales of IT woe submitted by you, our readers, since 1999. Which all goes to prove, conclusively, that hapless users and idiotic bosses are indeed worldwide phenomena. Free registration is all that's needed to download The Best of Shark Tank (PDF).