We have a setup with 3 Ubuntu servers and a Mac mini, running jenkins JNLP clients. The ubuntu servers are running KVM, adding another 4 Windows VMs, and 2 linux VMs, each running jenkins JNLP clients. When building, each of those clients produces a constant network load of about 1MiB/s up and down.

I suspect the frequently occurring network connection problems in our build system (RequestAbortedException during the build, SVN not being able to check out sometimes) are due to this heavy load.

Is there any way to minimize the network traffic, or to at least figure out what is causing this load?