Phil Scovell writes:
> I tried downloading the file myself during what I thought was a busy time 
> of
> day for the server and it took 40 minutes for me, too.  So, I can only
> conclude my web server has limited band width because it only took about 
> 10
> minutes to upload it to the FTP server.

	I downloaded it during mid afternoon yesterday and it
took about an hour or so on a very fast system connected to a
fast network, etc. It took around 10 or 15 seconds to copy it
from one system to another on the same network. In fact, I
didn't even time the copy because it was done before I even
thought to do so but it was probably about 1	5 seconds.

	OSU is on Onenet which is Oklahoma's educational
institutional Internet service provider and all the pipes to us
are pretty good these days.

	One of the things I do is to run the domain name servers
that serve our campus. We keep statistics on the number of name
lookups per hour which is a good measure of over all network
activity. We are pretty busy between about 7 in the morning
all the way through to around 2 the next morning so we have
about 5 hours between 2 and 7 when our usage falls off the cliff
as people go to sleep and the only thing left is mostly
automated activity such as Email, backups and timed jobs of
various types.

	Basically, you can count on things being very busy for
all but about 4 or 5 hours in the day.

	I think this is probably representative of a
non-university network also because we have several thousand
students who live on campus so we stay busy for the time period
that most people stay up. Your best chance of the best speeds
are between 2 and 7, give or take a bit, each day.

	I know that when we have to work on critical systems
like our name servers or our DHCP servers, the time between 2
and 7 is a much more relaxed time in which there are far less
people around to complain when things are down.

	Of course, the goal is to do one's work without causing
trouble for others, but sometimes, things go wrong with an
upgrade or there is just no way around down time, but it is best
to get it done in the wee hours.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group