Bandwidth Management for Software

Question

Level 2

217 points

Bandwidth Management for Software

Is there a utility out there that would allow you to allocate specific amounts of bandwidth any software could use? In many download managers (such as Speed Download, Limewire, Azul, etc.) you can easily set the total amount of bandwidth and even per file download parameters. I have always been surprised that browsers such as Safari and even iTunes does not allow you to control the amount of bandwidth it is to use when downloading.

I often find myself in situations where I need to download a large file, and yet be able to continue to surf for example, or else I would like to keep the setting in my iTunes to download podcasts automatically when I launch it. Both Safari and iTunes, will take as much bandwidth as you can throw at them which means that it can grind every other on line activity to a halt (specially when you do not have a blazing fat connection).

Anyone know of any such software?

Thanks.

iMac 24" 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.7), 4 GB RAM, 1TB HD

Posted on Jul 20, 2009 8:31 AM

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Answer 1

nerowolfe

Level 6

13,090 points

Jul 20, 2009 9:05 AM in response to Shahin

There is a built-in command named
nice
which you can access from the terminal.
Enter
man nice
for instructions.

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Answer 2

Shahin Author

Level 2

217 points

Jul 20, 2009 10:22 AM in response to nerowolfe

Thanks, but I don't understand what this has to do with bandwidth management? Perhaps I do not understand the capabilities of nice, but isn't nice just a way to prioritize applications and services? How would you use it to allocate bandwidth?

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Answer 3

Tim Haigh

Level 7

24,198 points

Jul 20, 2009 2:13 PM in response to Shahin

What you need is 'Quality of Service' and this is best implemented on your router, get a router that has QoS built in.

Then you can setup rules to priortise ACK data, dns lookups, mail, webrowsing, leave everything else. that is all you need to do.

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Answer 4

nerowolfe

Level 6

13,090 points

Jul 20, 2009 4:15 PM in response to Shahin

Shahin wrote:
Thanks, but I don't understand what this has to do with bandwidth management? Perhaps I do not understand the capabilities of nice, but isn't nice just a way to prioritize applications and services? How would you use it to allocate bandwidth?

By giving various jobs different priorities, the effective bandwidth is limited. If you use 100% of the bandwidth for 1% of the time and 0% of the bandwidth for 99% of the time, you are effectively giving the "niced" app only 1% of your bandwidth. And since a computer is digital, there is really no such thing as "instantaneous" bandwidth, as there is in other areas of communication.
If you have 10 processes running and each consumes 10% of your total bandwidth, it does not matter whether the processes are time-shared or bandwidth-limited, when considered over any reasonable period of time.

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