As part of our ongoing effort to manage the University's bandwidth use, there have been a couple of minor changes to the way the University's web caches work:
The most noticable of these will be that traffic destined for google.com and *.google.com will now be billed to per-user web quotas as well as per-host web quotas. Users will notice this when they're prompted to enter a username and password to use Google where they previously weren't. The reason for this is that the google.com domain now hosts significantly more than just a search engine. New Google features such as Gmail, Google Earth, etc constitute a significant proportion of the University's bandwidth use and were, until this morning, not being billed to per-user web quotas.
The google.co.za domain (and by implication the search of Rhodes' web site at http://www.google.co.za/univ/ru) is currently not billed to per-user quotas. This may be reviewed if Google choose to host content other than their search engine on the google.co.za domain.
The second change affects a number of non-academic sites (web-based e-mail providers, free SMS providers, etc). These sites regularly appear in the top twenty sites of our cache statistics meaning that they're some of the largest contributors to bandwidth use on campus. As a result we've limited the total volume of traffic that these particular sites can generate during peak hours. The impact of this is that these sites will appear to be slower, whilst other sites should appear to be a bit faster.
We're still in the process of fine tuning both the list of sites affected as well as the exact values we're using for throttling. At present, "peak hours" is defined as Monday-Friday 08:00-22:00, although this too may change depending on the impact on our international bandwidth. No nationally-hosted sites will be affected by this, although some internationally hosted .co.za domains may.