[olug] Help w/ my server

[Christopher Cashell]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 7:22 PM, DYNATRON tech <dynatron at gmail.com> wrote:
> in my situation, upstream is limited, so be creative with bandwidth use,
> and dont saturate upstream or youll kill the downstream as well.

I had challenges with this when I had the business cable modem and its
the annoying upload rate.  The solution, though not necessarily for
the faint of heart (unless you have previous experience), is QoS (the
'tc' command from the iproute2 tools).  With QoS, you can prioritize
certain traffic (specifically, interactive traffic (ssh/rdp/etc),
VoIP, and upstream ACKs.  That will help maximize your download
performance without negatively impacting latency sensitive
applications.

QoS has a well deserved reputation for complexity, but luckily there
are a few things that can make it easier.  First are the scripts/tools
that have been put together to help build a simple set of QoS policy
rules.  Luckily, for most home users, there isn't that much that's
required, so these simple tools can handle the heavy lifting.  If you
need something more complicated, it's probably easiest to start with
the output of one of these, and modify it from there.  Probably the
best known of these is called wondershaper, although shapecfg and
CBQ.init are also viable options.

The other alternative, if you only have occasional large downloads
that cause problems, or you don't want to deal with Linux's QoS, you
can also use a userspace program like trickle.  Trickle is a simple
tool that makes it trivial to limit the transfer rate of a single
application (for example, ftp or wget).

-- 
Christopher