Google Drive caching / sync

[Patrick Dunford]

We are integrating one of our schools with Google Apps and Chromebooks at the present time.

Issues are arising where students are accessing very large files that have been placed onto Google Drive by a teacher for them to work with. If a number of students access these files simultaneously, there are some concerns that they could consume a lot of the bandwidth on the N4L connection, which has a maximum speed of 100Mbps. For some students these files have been amounting to more than 1 GB of data per day for each student.

It's almost like it would be better if there was some way of caching the Drive content on a server in the school's premises, so that it would be more efficient. Is this as simple as putting in a caching proxy, or are there other ways of doing it?

In addition, staff have resources which are on the local hard drive of their laptop as well as in a network share on a server. If they are working on a Chromebook they will have only access to the Drive. If they are working on their laptop they have access to the Windows based resources. We probably want to keep some resources on the Windows servers because of these bandwidth issues when they are inside the school, but unless we have the servers syncing content to Google Apps automatically it will be messy or difficult to maintain such a system. 

It's almost like there needs to be a Drive client for servers.

[Joel Chandler]

Setting up Webdav may be an option for access but as for editing and uploading I'm not sure.

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[Tim Harper]

Hi Patrick,

there is no issue with students consuming 1GB per day in data.  At my school that would be at the very low end of what students consume.

Unless there is a specific performance issue that you have identified I would not worry about caching Drive locally.  I'm not even sure it is do-able as you are suggesting - as far I as I know the Drive client would have to be on the local computer and I've not heard of a Google Drive client for a Chromebook.

Possibly using Drive in offline mode might be a solution on a Chromebook?  See:  https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/2809731?hl=en

regards,

Tim Harper


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[Arnold Santos]

I've just deployed 100+ units of HP Chromebooks in one of the school I managed and will keep on monitoring the performance of wifi and traffic. Very interested to see if anyone will be having an issue with the Google Drive when used simultaneously. Will keep on watching this post.

Regards,

Arnold

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Arnold B. Santos
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Queenstown Primary School
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[trevor storr]

90+ chromebooks here at waimate and no bandwidth problems at all either on unifi wireless or n4l.  What constitues a large file these days?

cheers

Trevor

Trevor Storr
Director of eLearning, CantaNET http://educo.vln.school.nz
Waimate High School
Waimate
New Zealand

[Bevan McNaughton]

Taking into account that 15 years ago, a large file was something too big for a Floppy Disk. I suppose basing it on removable media these days it would be still down to limitations.. 2-4GB would be a Large file now, which is easily some video files under edit or a PhotoShop file for an Art board..... (within FAT32 limitations).

We use the Google Drive app here on Staff computers (selectively) and the biggest issue we face is around each users local cache. For Windows machines (I'm yet to try/confirm it), a central repository for Google Drive on their Roaming Profile share could do it but then you need a centralized engine to cache that to Google itself (i.e. rather than locally on each client)..

Some discussion on approaches here: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/396005-google-drive-as-networked-drive 

Bevan

Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

Southland Girls' High School

328 Tweed Street

Invercargill 9812

Phone: +64 3 211 6030

Fax: +64 3 216 9010

[trevor storr]

I've been playing around with GAFE unlimited storage as a backup soluion using a duplicity clone and found that the upload speed to gdrive was way to slow to be useful - maxing out at about 8 ish.  I think that Google rate limit single threads when they have been running for a while.  This was splitting exisiting backups into 50mb encrypted chunks.

[SteveC]

I'd like to echo Tim's comments regarding identifying an issue.

I've been doing initial research looking at loads on our infrastructure when a class of 20 students each install Ubuntu at the same time.  It's looking like the bottleneck is the local machines (very old IBM blade servers in our case) - the traffic to CityLInk's Ubuntu mirror is nowhere near saturation of the 30mbs link.  There is little difference in the time it takes to do the install using local files.  

If there is a problem caused by downloading 1GB per day per student, then it might be a local infrastructure issue, not much to do with GAFE.

Steve Cosgrove

Senior Lecturer, Whitireia New Zealand

[Mark Callagher]

Hi Patrick.

Two issues:

1. It being a new school to Google Drive/Apps that you are integrating, perhaps in time some PD would see the teacher(s) reduce the file sizes for the students and start to work more in Google Docs files which will see the upload/download decrease and more ongoing syncing/saving increase.

2. I have had a whole class working on Chromebooks on WeVideo - editing online video tools and it has been fine on N4L. We use Google Apps extensively. Departments are starting to move their files to Google Drive shared and linking through moodle courses for students (rather than hosting in moodle). This is proving very popular.

Google Drive cloud hosting of files is naturally faster and more accessible for all via many devices so I would stay away from complicating it as you have suggested looking at. 

Finally, we have no limits on our 1730 students data amounts via wireless or hardwire and works well.

Regards,

Mark

[Arnold Santos]

I've been told today that those Chromebooks we deployed are having issues with Google Drive, 90 units hooked up using Google Docs, some experiencing "unable to connect" even by opening a blank doc. We have the latest Ruckus r700 AP's, latest firmware on ZD1125, they are on separate VLAN, on Fibre Connection 100mbps, pfsense transparent proxy, no proxy caching. Other sites beside GDrive works well. No buffering on Youtube videos. No rate limiting applied and all have fair share of time slice.

If anyone can give me advice how to enhance the performance your help will be highly appreciated. I'm testing if turning off 2.4GHz Radio of APs will improve it and change the DNS on router will help.

Regards,

Arnold

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[trevor storr]

All other things being kept constant - is it only google drive from the chromebooks that are not able to connect - ie what about from a desktop/phone/laptop, but through your school wifi.  Try this both using the separate vlan and the default vlan.

[Andrew Godfrey]

On 7 November 2014 16:19, Arnold Santos <arn...@queenstown.school.nz> wrote:

I'm testing if turning off 2.4GHz Radio of APs will improve it

Do you mean turning off 2.4GHz does help or you are going to test it soon? I'm sure it will help minimise interference but you may need to increase the AP:classroom ratio to 1:2 or even 1:1 if you've still got any 7363 units.

We are going through the process of manually setting the channels on 2.4 only (auto channel 5GHz is fine) and improvements have been made for all devices. We have also disabled 2.4 completely on one or two access points. We turned off channelfly completely earlier this year and that seemed to stabilise channel changes.

If you have an Android phone or tablet then Wifi Analyzer is a great app for quickly seeing what's making all the noise. Walking through a major airport the other day I was getting awful coverage and this app was able to show me two strong Cisco APs on channel 1 and two on channel 11. Not a good situation.

_______________________________________

 

Andrew Godfrey  |  Network Manager  |  Burnside High School  |  Christchurch | New Zealand

[Steve Voisey]

Google Drive has had a rough couple of weeks for me across most of the schools that I touch. Performance is been far worse than normal. 

There have been patches when it was basically “down.”

Note the really long ping time earlier today: http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/drive.google.com.html

Kind regards,
Steve Voisey
021 308 563

[Arnold Santos]

We have four (4) year-7/8 classroom with 1:1 AP, capable of 802.11ac/n/g 3x3x3 antennae. Each classroom have around 25 Chromebooks on separate VLAN, BYOD devices on another VLAN, some wired desktop and laptops. I switched-off the 2.4Ghz WLAN for these particular AP's to see if this will improve the performance. Probably the max. client for the Chromebook WLAN (VLAN, transparent proxy) is around 100 which I think the APs will have no problem to handle. Last report I checked from the ZoneDirector 1125 is around 130 client connected from different AP and different VLAN at that time. Domain VLAN seems pretty good with GDrive (authenticated proxy), I guess less client is using them at that time.  Teachers were using Hapara and Google Classroom so these will be a major problem if they cannot use GDrive.

Any ideas to try will be most welcome.

Regards,

Arnold

[Jeffrey Burke]

The new 700 units have lower caps on 5ghz clients at the moment which may be messing it a bit if you have a stack of clients.  Ours are really strong though adding a bit of range on the old n gear snup (stealing networks from unsuspecting primaries) is still pushing.

Sent from my Windows Phone

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[Arnold Santos]

Success! Tried to transfer those Chromebooks to Domain-Wifi (default VLAN 1) with authenticated proxy and Google Drive plays well. I guess transparent proxy makes it slow for Google. Also, re-enable the 2.4GHz Radio on R700 to balance the connected client. Thanks for all the advice