Live Radio

Why is live stream radio bad for business system computers?

I need to justify to a fellow staffer why it is not advisable to allow live stream radio to run all day long on her computer workstation. We have an elderly server and also a live database which is a memory hog, but the priority because it is the database of customers. Nothing I say changes this person's actions, but if I can give her some negative reason why it is bad, it might be helpful. Thanks for any help.

Public Comments

1. eats up bandwidth. slows the office network down. go to your firewall and block the IP address. Everytime she fines a new one block it also. If you dont know how call 1-800-905-geek
2. Is your server also the gateway for the network? Otherwise it seems that the extra bandwidth required for streaming wouldn't factor in.
3. You'd actually have to do a site analysis before you could know that it's bad for the network. What's the segment bandwidth? How much of it (probably a tiny part) is her music stream using? As far as the aging server, if it's turned on, it's executing code. If it's streaming audio, it's executing the same amount of code as when it's "doing nothing" (if it's a Windows box, it executes a process called System Idle Process when it's not doing anything else - computers don't just not do anything). If it's a web server, or a file server, not the gateway server (which is probably the case - most systems don't use a computer as a gateway), what she streams from the internet has nothing to do with the server. The database hogs memory on the computer it's running on, not "network memory" (there is no such thing). If the database is running on the gateway server, you should talk to your IT people about inadvisable. Unless the network is experiencing problems, it's probably NOT inadvisable - except to the effect that she shouldn't be listening to music while she's working, but that has nothing to do with computers. You're probably terribly underutilizing your network, so there's plenty of spare bandwidth.