Wanna burst up to 300mbps? Try 1and1

I've said this before, 1and1's network is superb! I'm not sure what's the pool of bandwidth that they got, but what I got is more than enough. They have peerings with providers like Lycos, Yahoo!, Trustnet and many more. Their network exceeds my expectation.

For the past 4-5 days, one Linux box that I'm handling has been very busy. I'm also keeping an eye on it, I'm afraid that it may break anytime or maybe some services will just stop as it has been very busy lately. The Linux server works as HTTP server, the DB server is also on a Linux platform but it's not fully unitilized. Let's call this HTTP server as 'redmate' - that's actually the hostname assigned (redmate.internal) to the server. =)

redmate has been fully utilized for the past few days.

• Memory usage is hitting up to 90%
• Load average is around 20. It's a dual quad-core box.
• Some spikes on Disk I/O have been noticed too.

But what surprises me is the bandwidth usage. It's hitting up to 300 megabit, I thought it can only burst up to 100 mbps? Well not really.

Kansas vs Kentucky - resulting to 200mbps burst of bandwidth

Today is NCAA Men's Basketball finals, it's Kansas Jayhawks vs Kentucky Wildcats.
One of the server that I'm handling is hosting a webzine for NCAA Men's Basketball. Though it has no video streaming feature of the current match, the site is bursting up to 200mpbs of bandwidth for the past hour.

Wow! I thought 1and1 is shaping the bandwidth for dedicated servers to burst only up to 100mbps?
Does this mean that we can burst up to 1gbps? We'll never know unless we'll experience it, so I might do some stress testing within this month.

Okay, let me go back to the game. It's 2nd quarter now.