Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3964 mails)

[Danny Sauer <suse-linux-e.suselists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Neil wrote regarding '[SLE] OT: Calculating 95th Percentile' on Sun, Oct 31 at 05:46:
> Sorry for the off topic post, but I cant think of anywhere else to ask
> about this.
> I have googled and failed to find any valid answers.
> 
> I understand the principle of 95th percentile for bandwidth charging,
> but I dont get how it is monitored.
> 
> Our bandwidth is provided through a Summit48 switch / router.  We get
> given 1MB/s bursting to 2MB/s.
> 
> Is this achieved by configuring our port on the switch/router to have
> a max speed of 2MB/s ? then querying the switch/router every 5 minutes
> for the current throughput ?

Perhaps I'm looking at this in an overly simplistic light, but don't
you just take the customer's bandwidth usage at samples of n minutes,
and then bill them for the usage point at which 95% of their usage is
below?  In other words, make a chart, find the mean and standard
deviation, and add 2 standard deviations to the mean usage.  That'll
get you the point at which 5% of the n-minute average samples are
above and 95% of the n-minute samples are below.

On the other hand, if you have 1MB/s that can burst to 2MB/s, only 5%
of your traffic should be between 1MB/s and 2MB/s.  Enforce that any
way you want - allow full pipe usage for a few hours until 5% of the
month's time is used, then bump down to 1MB/s, charge the customer if
they use too much, allow passing 1 of every 20 packets that would
otherwise be dropped by the rate limiter, etc.

Maybe that helps.  Maybe it doesn't...
--Danny