The main thing I'm not seeing covered in this thread is the difference between throttling the application versus at the interface or router is that shared traffic (even if only other use of the same protocol) is also affected. There are many possible situations where you can dedicate a throttled virtual interface for such use, which is easy if you've dedicated a xen instance to handling backup synchronizations... but beware ye experimenters, see if stereo sounds so good through one wire :) On a similar subject, if you do go throttling an asymmetric uplink like cable, as might be Mr. O's case, watch out that your max up-rate is greater than for instance your housemate's throttled connection (assuming throttling is symmetric, or consider up-rate)... since TCP uses handshakes, syn/ack, if your upstream is maxed out then the rest of your downstream is effectively useless. There are some prioritization schemes IIRC which help in these cases; I think BSD's pf had some of the first open-sourced ones in recent years.
cheers, Ben
_______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
