I was reading a networking material and it mentions that for optimizing a network, for congestion control and QoS, we need to minimizing maximum link utilization. I don't understand what does this means. Aren't we suppose to utilize all of the available bandwidths? why we need to minimize it?
I would appreciate it if you could help me to understand what does "minimizing maximum link utilization" concept means.
The difference between maximum link capacity and link utilization defines your headroom for future growth or additional workloads. The smaller this headroom the shorter is your time before you have to upgrade the network.
If you manage to distribute the load more evenly and lower the peak network utilization (with the same overall/daily throughput) the longer the time you can use the network without problems and the lower the overall cost. Of course, lowering the overall throughput serves the same purpose.
If all your links are constantly running at maximum utilization during normal operation, you won't have much spare capacity when some unexpected event occurs.
