Bandwidth

Your own hardware may be working wonderfully, but it’s being strangled by bandwidth limitations between you and the Web backbone. You should be able to make rough estimates of the bandwidth you need by multiplying the number of transactions per second by the number of bytes transferred (making allowance for the substantial HTTP headers that go with each web page). Having done that, check what is actually happening by using a utility like ipfm from http://www.via.ecp.fr/~tibob/ipfm/:

HOST                    IN        OUT      TOTAL 
host1.domain.com        12345     6666684  6679029 
host2.domain.com        1232314   12345    1244659 
host3.domain.com        6645632   123      6645755
...

Or use cricket (http://cricket.sourceforge.net/) to produce pretty graphs.

Get Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.