[wellylug] traffic shaping

[David Zanetti]

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On Mon, 3 May 2004, Glen Ogilvie wrote:

> I am looking for something that is simple to configure that will keep http 
> traffic quick, when other network traffic might slow things down.  

It's covered at lartc.org, but I mention it here because it's important to
remember, and it's not clear what you really want from the description:

Shaping only applies to traffic being sent out. If you want wanting to
ensure what what HTTP you send is prioritised over other traffic, then
shaping is what you want.

If you're on the end of a small pipe, and you want to "shape" how incoming
bandwidth is used, it's more correctly called policing, and there's no
easy way to do it. It's all pretty brutal methods, because you can't as
easily influence the "fat" end of the link and the decisions it makes. In
Linux, it's my favorite method of all - drop packets until the far end (as
in, the really far end of the stream) works out you can't handle the
load. Really ugly. 

If you have control of the fat side of your small pipe, then you just do
it with shaping, and all is good in the world. But that's not usually the
state of things. :)

Do read up at lartc.org about this, since they explain it better than I
just did :)

- -- 
David Zanetti           |  (__)             
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