[LARTC] Incoming traffic?

[Andreas Klauer]

On Tuesday 04 October 2005 11:33, Dominik Werder wrote:
> a program is downloading large files on a regular basis and has no
> switch to limit bandwidth.
>
> Is there a way to shape this incoming traffic? Any pointers?

On a router, you could just setup shaping on the LAN interface. On a 
standalone machine, you'd either have to use ingress qdisc, or if you want 
to use more familiar schedulers like HTB for incoming traffic, maybe IMQ 
can help you.

Shaping incoming traffic usually works by dropping packets that were 
already sent to you and hoping that the other side will back off and send 
packets slower. This causes overhead (as packets have to be re-sent) which 
is why some people don't like this method.

Personally, I've been using this approach for ages on my router (shaping 
incoming traffic as outgoing traffic on LAN interface) and found that it's 
better than having a single person / download choke the line completely...

Better methods are said to exist (like tcp window resizing or whatever) but 
I've never seen them implemented in Linux so far.

HTH
Andreas Klauer