We recently had this very same issue with one of our remote sites connected with a site to site VPN. We did decide to use the BITS GPO to throttle and applied it to the OUs for all of our remote sites. I know WSUS allows for some randomization (check in interval +/- 20%, IIRC) but if you have users that turn their machines off at night you will inevitably get bunching at the start of business and shortly thereafter. <-- Insert WOL, SCCM, Shavlik, WSUS Child servers, etc comments -->
If you are able to keep the systems on to truly distribute the download times and if BITS is able to calculate the effective link speed between client and server you are probably fine. In our case, I don't believe either was happening. Why it was a problem that day and not on others I couldn't say. I can say that it was only about 20 machines over a few hours that was doing the damage. We only encountered this problem one time so saying that we haven't encountered it since isn't saying much at all. I recently stumbled across the throttling via IIS and have yet to look into it deeper. That is preferred, in my opinion, because other applications can use BITS and I would hate to unknowingly throttle something and cause complications later. From: David Mazzaccaro [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 10:58 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: BITS question not sure, but I do know this - I have 8 locations in 5 states, all low bandwidth connections back to me (512k - 768k). WSUS updates NEVER slow down/clog up the circuits. Now, on the other hand... we do use this anitivirus application called Vipre which is not so nice with bandwidth restrictions (I wish it used BITS!!!!) ;-P ________________________________ From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 9:19 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: BITS question Question about Microsoft BITS: If a machine is on a fast LAN link locally but connected to a remote office via slow link, how does BITS determine network bandwidth for throttling? IE remote office grabbing Windows Updates via WSUS - does the application using BITS do some end-to-end test? My network guy is telling me WSUS updates for 17 PC's is killing T1 bandwidth (we have VoIP on the same link). I know I can throttle BITS via GPO but would like to know if I *need* to make the change or not. Any links to MS articles on BITS would be helpful. I already found this one and downloaded the Word doc: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/bits.mspx Thanks, David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
