Slow web access

We've received numerous complaints about slow web access, resulting in problems with Discovery Streaming, Plato, and [gasp!] YouTube. We feel your pain- we are experiencing it as well, and we are working on the problem.

We have enough bandwidth to accommodate our traffic, even with the anticipated increase due to Google Apps Gmail. In the graph below, the green parts are incoming traffic, which is 95% web traffic. As you can see, it used only about half of the 20 Mbps available. (The blue line is an upload of backup files, which stopped this morning at 8 AM, and doesn't significantly affect download speeds.)

So, why is this happening? At this point, we believe the issue is caused by a service configuration in our firewall. This summer we replaced an obsolete network firewall with a new one. Like most things technological, the new one has more capabilities, but is also more complex. Everything seemed to be working fine until Tuesday, when everybody returned to school. (It's hard to simulate the 1,600 simultaneous users for a test, so Tuesday was the first day of a real, full load. )

We are working with a Cisco engineer to figure out the problem. We'll keep you updated on this blog.