Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 13:48:40 -0800 (PST) From: matthew@scruz.net (Matthew Kaufman)
If you take a look at http://ext2.mfsdatanet.com/MAE/west.ames.overlay.html you find that the Ames FDDI ring is totally saturated. Now, that means that anyone who's trading traffic over on that side, or between Ames and San Jose, is getting really really lousy performance.
What I don't understand is why that has _stayed_ saturated... it seems to me that some of the big players would have rerouted their traffic by now to avoid subjecting it to this, which would also have the side effect of causing the problem to, at least for the short term, go away.
We, too, have notices the problem, although we mostly see it in packets bound for the MFD ring. Pings to other Ames peers seem to do fine. This started abruptly on about March 7th and has been consistently bad since then. That is about the time BBN Planet started routing everything there via AS1, but I have no idea of this is a significant part of the problem. FWIW, MFS blames the load on the GIGAswitch, although I don't see this indicated in the plots. They didn't give us any estimate for improving the situation. R. Kevin Oberman Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) EMAIL: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 422-6955