[SOLVED] Issue with bandwith limiting: going over the limit

[ratnes6]

Hey!

I would like to limit the bandwith, but my problem is, that the softwares I tried (NetLimiter, Netbalancer) don't exactly limit the way I want them to.

I used speedtest.net to showcase what im talking about:

https://imgur.com/5DooULi

View: https://i.imgur.com/5DooULi.jpg


The first result is the default one, without any limiting. The second one was made by using Google Chromes throttle feature. At the third one I was using NetLimiter.

As you can see, when using NetLimiter (or NetBalancer), there is a peak at the start, which is much higher than the given limit.


Is there any way (preferably software based), to limit the bandwith on the whole PC, like Chrome limits it? Sadly, using my router is not a solution for it, since it doesn't have a bandwitch limiting feature. My goal would be to limit the bandwith on a family member's PC, who watches lots of videos on youtube and other sources, and it causes lagspikes in online games, I presume it has to do with the currently enabled NetLimiter's peak download rates. since youtube only loads a portion of the video at a time, and I guess everytime it loads more of the video, the download rate at the start always goes to the peak. resulting in short, but frequent lagspikes..

 

[bill001g]

This is a well known issue with any form of traffic limitation.

You have a number of problems. The first is you can't really limit download traffic. The ISP will send the traffic and it has already used the bandwidth by the time your machine gets it. The damage is already done at that point. You can not configure what the ISP sends or does not send. All your machine can do is discard traffic it actually receives and not give it to the application and hope the application will interpret the lost data as a reason to request less data. It does not work on all applications.

Next you need to understand how traffic is really sent. For example on a gigabit ethernet cable the data is only send a 1gbit or 0gbit. So the connection is always fully used or not used at all. Anything you see about rates is a average rate. How these averages are calculated is key.

Your graph is actually a good example. The graph themselves is using a different average rate than the number that is displayed under the download rate. But as you suspect even this graph does not show the actual problem. The data is being sent in bursts. The graph just averages them down. It does partially show the initial one but that is a related to how speedtest works and how aggressively it attempt to use all the bandwidth.

You are going to be limited since most this stuff can only be done as traffic is being sent....ie on the ISP router. Most tools are not designed to do this on the receive side....since it actually does not fix the real issue it just hides it. In any case the feature you need to look for is called BURST rate by most things. In effect what you need to do is set the amount of time the traffic is allowed to use the connection for. You are in effect setting the period of time it calculates the average over. It is actually a very hard thing to get correct because the times are so small and packet size can vary.

In your case you likely are just going to have to set the limit lower than are so the peaks are lower.

 

[helpstar]

Can you set something like Quality of Service(QOS)/Media Prioritization settings in your router?