freebsd realtime network usage limiter?

[Andy Greenwood]

On 1/23/07, deeptech71 at gmail.com <deeptech71 at gmail.com> wrote:
> That is, I have a router connecting to the internet through PPP. There are 4
> computers (and a DSL modem) connected to the router. The router does not limit
> or share internet speed evenly, so if I download via TCP at full speed, others
> complain about slow loading web pages. My comp has a FreeBSD OS. How can I
> limit my upload and download speed to, say, 0.333 of the speed permitted by my
> provider? Also, if I had a FreeBSD router, how could I share speed evenly?
>

You can pretty easily set up a FBSD router to shpe bandwidth like
this. I have done exactly that using the PF firewall with ALTQ.
Unfortunately, ALTQ is not availible as a loadable module, so if you
want to use it, you'll have to recompile the kernel with support
enabled.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/firewalls-pf.html
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/

that should get you started

> BTW: Is it true that are some types of traffic that need higher priority, such
> as games using UDP, so that data does not lag?

Absolutely it is true. I don't run any gaming through my firewall, but
one great example is TCP ACK packets. If you are on an asymmetrical
connection (up/down bandwith aren't equal) you should prioritize
outgoing TCP ACK packets to the highest level, since this will improve
download performance.

You might want to look at ports/security/pfw if you're not familiar
with pf syntax, and it can make building a ruleset a lot easier, at
least for the first time.

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