Monitoring and Tuning Your Server

Bandwidth and Capacity

Bandwidth is measured in several different ways:

The rate at which bytes are transferred to and from the server.
The rate at which data packages are sent by the server. Data packages include frames, packets, segments, and datagrams.
The rate at which files are sent and received by the server.

Effective bandwidth varies widely depending upon the transmission capacity of the link, the server configuration, and the server workload. The values for a single server also change as it operates, in response to demand and to competition for shared network resources.

Network capacity is measured, in part, by the number of connections established and maintained by the server.