network tools

Lars Kristiansen lars+lister.freebsd at adventuras.no
Sat Sep 3 03:11:57 PDT 2005



--On Saturday, September 03, 2005 12:01:56 AM +0100 Chris 
<chris at childeric.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I share broadband with a couple of other people. One of them uses
> limewire p2p software. When limewire is not running browsing feels fast
> and ftp on my freebsd box says it's downloading at 115 to 120 kB/s. Even
> when I have an ftp download going browsing doesn't seem very much
> affected. I assume from this that my usage won't affect the other people
> very much.
>
> When limewire is running, even though it is throttled, ftp downloads run
> at half speed or less and my experience of browsing is that it is
> sluggish.
>
> Today I had a download running at about 60kB/s and he said his (XP based)
> limewire was showing 25kB/s download and 5kB/s upload. When he turned off
> limewire my download speed went back to 120k.
>
> Why don't the numbers support the experience? We have 1Mb/s download and
> 128K upload (telewest cable). In theory even between us we weren't using
> all the bandwidth.

The following is clipped from <http://openbsd.org/faq/pf/queueing.html>,
 but other firewalls can do this to afaik.
Maybe that could be helpful when sharing adsl.

<clip>
Assigning TCP ACK packets to a higher priority queue is useful on 
asymmetric connections, that is, connections that have different upload and 
download bandwidths such as ADSL lines. With an ADSL line, if the upload 
channel is being maxed out and a download is started, the download will 
suffer because the TCP ACK packets it needs to send will run into 
congestion when they try to pass through the upload channel. Testing has 
shown that to achieve the best results, the bandwidth on the upload queue 
should be set to a value less than what the connection is capable of. For 
instance, if an ADSL line has a max upload of 640Kbps, setting the root 
queue's bandwidth to a value such as 600Kb should result in better 
performance. Trial and error will yield the best bandwidth setting.
</clip>

>
> If I put a FreeBSD NAT/router box between the cable modem and the LAN
> what console based tools should I put on it to examine what's happening?
>
> I would very much appreciate any help as this is becoming a bit of an
> issue here.
>
> fwiw FreeBSD box.13dog.org 5.4-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE #0: Sun Aug 21
> 17:46:54 BST 2005.
>
> Thanks
>
> Chris



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