[K12OSN] Experience with a thin client server connection getting throttled?

[Todd O'Bryan]

My district has over 90,000 students and I have the only thin client lab. In
my lab we're having a big problem with network connectivity as connections
get lost pretty often, especially when lots of users are surfing. The
network guy came out and saw how bad the connectivity was when we tried to
connect to internet sites like Google, Yahoo, and CNN. We then tried surfing
within the district and discovered there were no problems. He set us to
bypass the filter box, a FortiNet appliance that filters the whole district,
and we had no problems on the internet, so it's apparently the filter that's
slowing things down. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, we can't run
without a filter. For political reasons too complicated to go into, we also
can't set up an alternate filtering system for just my lab.

I suspect that other users don't see this problem because the filter sees an
unreasonable amount of traffic coming from what it thinks is a single
computer and throttles the connection. (We also have the remnants of a
November virus outbreak on the network that is flooding everything with
stray packets, so the filter could be busier than it should be. They're
still working on cleaning that up.)

Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing, with either FortiNet or
another filter appliance, where thin client labs see a performance
degradation compared to single-user systems? If so, did you have any luck
solving it?

Thanks,
Todd
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