TORONTO – A University of Toronto crackdown on Napster users and others hogging the campus bandwidth has reversed a recent problem with a slowing of computer transmission of data to and from the U of T.

The university’s web and information services manager, Bruce Rolston, reports in the April 23 U of T Bulletin that steps to inform the public about who was using up the university’s computer resources, and to encourage administrators to stop serious abusers, have produced a significant improvement in the speed of campus Internet connections.

Rolston quotes Eugene Siciunas, head of U of T’s computing and networking services (CNS), as saying, "What we have shown is, if department and residence administrators can be encouraged to act on abuses by their own staff and students, everybody can benefit."

U of T’s Internet bandwidth "pipelines" of 35 megabits per second cost about $400,000 a year. But it wasn’t proving enough early this year, as systems administrators and users found the system maxing out and clogging up, even when more bandwidth was added.

The problem, CNS found, was individual users taking up massive amounts of the system’s resources. Many were students living in U of T residences, using file-swapping programs like Napster to trade music, or hosting computer games like Quake on their computers. This traffic was competing with all the other users: people researching on the web, sending e-mail, or using the library online catalogue.

"I’m still astounded at the impact on the university of programs like Napster," Siciunas says. "Our outgoing traffic was consistently saturated. Some individual users were exceeding the library system, or the institutional e-mail system. It was so high that legitimate use, by both on-campus and off-campus users, was being impacted. They were gobbling up our bandwidth."

Some residence file-swapping servers were even transferring more data than the entire library system, which typically communicates 20 gigabytes of information, in and out, a day. The U of T as a whole communicates about 300 gigabytes on a typical weekday.

Administrators wanted to be careful not to crack down on any particular kind of Internet traffic, even the apparently non-academic ones, since file-swapping programs similar to Napster can also have academic uses, and it wasn’t central computing’s business to police behavior in residences.

The issue, administrators decided in a series of meetings, was really people who were using more than their fair share of common resources. So CNS staff created a website which shows everyone who wants to know who exactly is using up U of T’s bandwidth day-by-day. (http://www.noc.utoronto.ca/ipaudit/.) Siciunas set an arbitrary benchmark of one gigabyte per day, or a third of one per cent of all U of T traffic, as an tolerable amount of use for one person. Administrators whose people were using more than that would be encouraged to investigate why. And for residences, all Internet traffic from the building is being capped, with its own "pipeline", until administrators assure CNS they are able to restrain their heaviest users from taking an unreasonable share.

"The only alternative we had would have been to buy more bandwidth," Siciunas says.

Some residences reacted quickly, cutting off the accounts of their heaviest users until they assured the administrators that their traffic would be kept to reasonable levels.

It wasn’t all students, either. At least one professor who was using a disproportionate share of bandwidth for a quasi-academic use was also asked to scale back out of consideration for others, Siciunas said.

Siciunas believes the increased awareness and community pressure is helping – but a look at statistics for April 4 shows the library (20 gigabytes) and the university health network (4 gigabytes) share the Top-10 with at least five computers in one residence network, one clocking in at an astounding 10 gigabytes transferred in one day.

For more information, contact communications.office@usask.ca

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