Recently I had a chance to work for a client who complained about slowness between his VPN sites . He had his network vendor put some qos for him but it still was slow. Lot many people suggested bandwidth enhancement new devices etc.
Most of the time people don't realise what is the reason of slowness.
People will come up to you and say its the Internet and that's why its slow . Now I don't disagree with the fact that on the Internet things can slow down at times for reasons beyond your control. But not all the time. If you spend some time in trying to understand the main reason of slowness you will find that there are things you can do to actually make this work for you.
To solve the issue that my client had I had my friend Robin configure me a laptop with smoke ping , and ntop .It was amazing as to what you discover when you actually start looking . We found on smoke ping the latency between the sites go up dramatically between 8:30 am and 5:00 pm during office hours . The link would remain stable at 2 or 3 ms at the start of the day and then it would go up to 1 to 2 sec . At the end of the day it would go back to between 2 and 3 ms .
Ntop was able to accurately identify the servers and the ports on which the was sending huge amount of data to each other between the site . We contacted the vendor whose application was responsible for the spikes . The vendor than realised a patch for the application and wow no more delays . The whole thing took more than a month but the client was saved a lot of hassle of upgrading his bandwidth buying new devices etc.
Long story short it is very easy to find the root cause of a problem given the right tools . And tools today need not be expensive .
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