limit bandwidth on sftp

Lowell Gilbert freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org
Tue Mar 16 14:40:38 UTC 2010


krad <kraduk at googlemail.com> writes:

> On 15 March 2010 13:34, Lowell Gilbert <
> freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org> wrote:
>
>> Tsu-Fan Cheng <tfcheng at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> >    I need to limit my sftp session bandwidth to 20K, can someone show me
>> how
>> > to do it? thank you!
>>
>> There's no simple way to do that.
>>
>> scp has such a capability, though; maybe using that is your easiest option?
>
> You could limit port 22 with pf, ipfw etc. This would slow all you ssh
> traffic rather than just sftp which may or may not work for you. If you are
> clever with your rule sets you could guarantee bw for certain hosts so they
> dont loose a functional ssh session and/or you could bw limit it by source
> ip, rather than a global limit for port 22.

Aside from having to configure it, the downside of this approach is that
it involves dropping some traffic and waiting for the retransmit, so it
will be less efficient than a bandwidth limit in the application
itself.  TCP's dynamic window resizing (especially with Selective
ACKnowledgements) should keep the firewall from having to drop too many
packets, but changing conditions on the network can keep that from
working as well as you'd like.  If using this technique, make sure the
other side supports SACK, preferably for multiple segments.

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/


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