Recreational Internet applications such as BitTorrent have been designed to cleverly slip past corporate firewalls. While BitTorrent, Skype, MySpace and YouTube provide great entertainment value, these aggressive applications can dominate the corporate network by guzzling limited bandwidth and often negatively impact important business applications. Companies need a way to detect and control this recreational peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet traffic. Some WAN optimization solutions have the ability to detect and block or slow recreational P2P traffic. This capability coupled with application visibility, application acceleration and traffic optimization can preserve application performance and reduce network operating costs. This white paper provides a practical overview on the evolution of recreational P2P traffic, how it is impacting corporate networks and offer specific recommendations for controlling these recreational applications to achieve peak application performance.