I work in an office that’s connected to other agencies through a WAN. Normally I can ping machines at those other agencies at around 7ms consistently. Recently I’ve had to add two divisions that lost their Internet service (they were on a separate LAN). Ever since, my ping times have been up in the 300-2000 ms range. We have two applications that “talk” to machines on different segments of the WAN and now they’ve slowed down considerably. I’ve done some packet sniffing and I’ve consistently found that the majority of bandwidth usage is HTTP traffic.
So here’s the question. Is it typical that HTTP traffic to considerably slow down plain old TCP/IP connections? I guess I should mention that I can ping any machine on our internal network in less than 2ms.