I am thinking about the LCRP deal that RackShack has planned. A 10Mbps line can theoretically put out 3240 GB of data per month, according to my calculations. As for a 5Mbps line, that is 1620 GB per month.

How much bandwidth can I realistically use on a 10Mbps or a 5Mbps line and still have my website maintain fast response times, though?

I think with ethernet you can push about 40% of total capacity before you run into problems.

aslo you need to realize, your rack can only push say 200-300gigs before you start running into problems, so your never going to be able to use that...

RackMy: you're quite right, but this isn't Ethernet. It may be called "ethernet" but it bears no relation to the CSMA medium which that 40% rule applies to.

pmak0: A common rule is that the 95th percentile usage level should stay below 50% line utilization. For typical traffic patterns, a 95th percentile level of 5Mbps would be around 800-1000GB/month of traffic.

Originally posted by cbaker17
aslo you need to realize, your rack can only push say 200-300gigs before you start running into problems, so your never going to be able to use that...

1. My main server with RackShack is a Duron server, not a RaQ.

2. I also have a RaQ4i with them, and last month it put out 500 GB. The only reason it crashed was because the log analysis software occupied all the swap space (since the logs got huge); after I turned that off, it was able to handle all that data transfer with no problem. Right now, it is handling 84 concurrent httpd connections and the load average is 0.05, CPU 95% idle.

Originally posted by cperciva
pmak0: A common rule is that the 95th percentile usage level should stay below 50% line utilization. For typical traffic patterns, a 95th percentile level of 5Mbps would be around 800-1000GB/month of traffic.

From my experiences with Dialtone Internet last year when they were billing bandwidth by 95 percentile, I'm guessing that 95 percentile usage is roughly 3x that of actual usage.

Does that mean at 5Mbps, I can only comfortably put out about 300 GB per month before the website starts feeling slow?

pamk0: I'm quite surprised that you saw a factor of three difference there, unless the total traffic you were using was quite low to begin with. In any case, even with that value it would be 500GB/month *before the server started to noticeably slow down 5% of the time*.
That's the basic idea behind 95th percentile measurement -- it tells you how much bandwidth you need to get good performance almost all of the time.

Originally posted by pmak0
From my experiences with Dialtone Internet last year when they were billing bandwidth by 95 percentile, I'm guessing that 95 percentile usage is roughly 3x that of actual usage.

On our servers, it tends to be closer to about 2x. But thats still a huge difference.

(Clarification: We don't bill our customers based on 95th)

Originally posted by cperciva
pamk0: I'm quite surprised that you saw a factor of three difference there, unless the total traffic you were using was quite low to begin with. In any case, even with that value it would be 500GB/month *before the server started to noticeably slow down 5% of the time*.
That's the basic idea behind 95th percentile measurement -- it tells you how much bandwidth you need to get good performance almost all of the time.

So a 5Mbps line can comfortably handle 500 GB per month? That would mean that a 10Mbps line could comfortably handle 1000 GB per month. I guess I can consider that the RackShack 10Mbps deal can realistically transfer 1000 GB then, right?

Well it depends on your server specs.....

500 GB - 1000 GB.... even if you have a 10 MBPS line to yourself... You still need to equipment to utilize it.