Originally posted by vBreezo
reply to post by badmedia
Bandwidth is NOT unlimited. If it were, the "Denial of Service" barrage that hits the net from spammers occassionaly would not occur. Yes, that
originates with overloaded servers but it also affects network traffic in general as the major routers also have excessive traffic as a result.
Writing "tons of bandwidth" indicates that you need college grads just to get the terminology straight.
First, no where did I say it was unlimited. I said that the amount of bandwidth available has increased by a ton, despite the growing amount of
users. 1 user today has the bandwidth that 100+ people used in total only a few years ago. Still, the internet was fine.
Second, a DOS attack is when a server overloads, and more specifically it eats up the amount of connections a server has. Servers have 2 main
settings in this area, 1 is "max connections", and 2 is the time out rate.
What happens in a DOS attack usually is that the request is made, but the return request is not accepted and the server is unable to send the
response. So it sits there and waits for the full time out rate. While it is sitting there waiting, it is using up 1 of the servers connection.
So a DOS attack uses many requests all at once in order to take up all the available connections. The next user tries to contact the site, and as
there is no connection availble, the user also sits there and waits for their own timeout amount trying to get a connection.
The pages then load slowly
not because of a lack of bandwidth, but because of a lack of connections. Each image and such on a website
requires it's own connection. This includes Javascript, CSS and so forth. Any outside links of information. As such, the page will appear to
load slowly, or not load completely due to the lack of connections.
Thus a denial of service.
This further complicates things as regular users are then becoming backed up themselves, further contributing to the problem.
Yes, DOS attacks can eat up a bit of bandwidth. But as the DOS attacks points out - the end result is felt on the server mostly, and the servers
give out long before the network and bandwidth does.
[edit on 10/30/2009 by badmedia]