On 2016-05-12, niya levi <[email protected]> wrote:
> using broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk i measured the bandwidth on my virgin
> media line,
> the download speed varied form as low as 20Mb/sec up to 50Mb/sec
> depending on the time of day the test was run,

Queuing is done on the transmit side, so the bandwidth you should be
interested is upload, not download.

You have already received the download traffic. You *can* queue when
you pass it on to another host but that doesn't have a direct effect
on what people on the internet send to you so however you do things
"download queueing" won't work reliably. If I send 1Gb/s of packets
to you, it doesn't matter what you do, it's going to starve out
other traffic and nothing you can do on your side of the link is
going to help.

> what will be the result if i put a value for the queue bandwidth which
> is greater or lesser the the maximum download speed ?

If lesser: transfers will be limited to a slower speed than is actually
available. This gives more predictable performance; queues work ok;
but total bandwidth will be reduced.

If greater: you lose control over queueing as it will then be done on
a device upstream from you (e.g. a modem or router on the next hop
or later).

If the times/bandwidths are fairly predictable then you could always
use a cronjob to switch config. (Setup variables in pf.conf to reference
in the 'queue' rules then you can override them like 'pfctl -Dbandwidth=20M
-Dbulk=3M -f /etc/pf.conf' rather than having a mess of separate files).
That way you don't lose too much at times when the ISP is coping, and
still don't have too many problems when they're overloaded.

But hopefully your upload bandwidth is a lot more consistent throughout
the day anyway.

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