Five Things that Can Affect your Network Performance

Network performance can be affected in many ways, and any problems can give rise to serious complaints from your customers, leading to additional expenses. To help you avoid such situations, we’ve compiled a list of issues that you may not be aware of:

1. Client traffic policing: Traffic policing in networks is a very common practice, and constitutes one of the best ways for service providers to ensure that their customers are getting exactly what they are paying for. While limiting the rate on an interface, that interface has to sustain a constant burst of traffic.
2. Aggregation: Since data traffic is “bursty” by nature, service providers usually tend to aggregate multiple clients’ traffic over a smaller connection, and use their networks more efficiently. If all their customers use the same link simultaneously, loss of traffic could ensue.
3. Application servers: Application servers exist in all networks. However they all differ, and so do their communication drivers. These servers are responsible for calling the TCP/IP stack to transport data, and the way they are used has a significant impact on the end user’s experience.
4. TCP/IP stack: Most of today’s TCP/IP stacks are implemented by major servers, such as Windows Server 2003 and Linux- or Solaris-based servers. These TCP/IP stacks have many different ways to control the various parameters of TCP, and also implement various algorithms to increase the TCP throughput.
5. Congestion: Congestion is very common in today’s networks. High-bandwidth-requesting applications such as video can easily create congestion on a network.

Now, how do we solve these issues?

The only way to prevent these issues or to address them when they occur is through a transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput test, which can easily, efficiently and quickly identify and resolve them.  This makes it possible to further qualify service-level agreements (SLAs) by providing performance indicators relevant to the transmission of application data over a reliable TCP connection.