Traffic Shaping on DSL?

jackla asks: "I'm now looking for software to do traffic-control on my Windows XP box. I am connected with DSL and my upstream is capped at 96kbit/s (down is 1.5Mbit/s) - this means that high(>70kbit/s) upstream utilisation KILLS my downstream: it just drops down to about 400kbit/s and stays there unless there's more upstream space. That said, I read alot about the Linux shaping solution (wondershaper or something) which sounds exactly right, except I need something that works for Windows. What I want to do is prioritize upstream ACKs (for example) so that my downstream isn't affected by upstream use. If anyone heard of a peace of software that can do this, I would love to hear about it." It would be nice if something like this existed cheaply for Windows. I am unaware of such, but maybe a few of you have ideas. Could such a traffic shaper be built using low powered computers? If so, how would you build and configure it so it would maintain compatibility for the single Windows machine, behind it? (Think: homebuilt traffic-shapping appliance)

Comments

Re:Packet Scheduler

[bogie]

Unfortunatly this won't help him. The QOS packet service is designed primarily for audio/video applications and would require that every router he connected through strictly obeyed the 802.1p protocol. That is just not going ot happen.It also requires a heck of a lot more then just clicking that little check box on the XP client. You can just consider that an on/off switch, the real work is done at the server and endpoint router levels.

Have a look at this link for some futher explaination. http://infocenter.cramsession.com/techlibrary/geth tml.asp?ID=1674

Bandwidth Limiting HOWTO

[dimator]

Bandwidth Limiting HOWTO might be of some assitance? Or not... either way. It just caught my eye on linuxdoc.

Lots of people complain about this....

[billstewart]

There are a couple of problems that can lead to this symptom, and asymmetric connections are more likely to suffer from it. Basically, if your upstream bandwidth is swamped with file transfers, it's hard for the ACKs for packets you receive on your downstream to get through, so the downstream TCP sessions get throttled. Many DSL providers oversubscribe their links (though the problem is usually worse downstream than upstream)(cable can have this problem also), so that 128kbps upstream you thought you had might only be 38kbps if lots of people are uploading at the same time - so your upstream packets may be queued at the DSLAM, and your little ACK packets have to wait for a windowful of big file transfer packets to clear out, or they may be queued in _your_ DSL router. An 8KB TCP window is 80k bits, so even if you're getting your whole 128kbps upstream, that's over half a second of data that could be sitting ahead of your ACK, dogging your downstream flow rate. It's especially bad if your upstream traffic has a big window size, while your downstream is using slowstart and has never gotten a very big window.

So yes, traffic shaping can be your friend. Unfortunately, it may be hard to know what to tune it too, depending on where the bottleneck is.

BBIAgent

[t0qer]

I've been running BBIagent
http://www.bbiagent.net
for about the last year or so. I share my DSL with a few neighbors via some cat5 we strung up over the last year, and my counterstrikin was startin to hurt real bad whenever one of the teenager kids was downloading from kazza

Before I was using a linksys router. My current BBIagent setup is a packard bell p60 with 32 megs of ram, and 2 old 16 bit isa 3com nics. The performance increase is stunning.

You can specify what kind of traffic to create priority for, forward, block ports. There are a few options for hack detection blocking. The nicest features of bbiagent is.

1. Single floppy distro which is configured on the fly via the bbiagent website
2. Java app for admining the sucker, very well laid out.
3. Realtime control over your network connection without losing it. On my linkstink whenever I would change a rule or a forward the whole thing would reboot itself, bbiagent doesnt do that.
4. Open source!
5. Linux Based!

I can go on and on about it, but if you're really looking to control what and how packets are handled, I would really recomend giving bbiagent a try.

--toq

You aren't going to be able to fix this locally

[tlambert]

The reason your downstream rate gets limited by your upstream rate limit is because of your inability to send acknowledgements upstream for the downstream packets you are receiving because of the congestion on the upstream link.

Once the advertised receive window is filled with packets, the remote side is not going to send any more data until it gets an ack from your computer.

At the point that the rate is being limited, the way to fix this is to give preference to ACK packets -- i.e. packets without payload.

The problem is that this has to be done at the point the rate is being limited, which is at your providers router, not at your router, and not at your Windows machine.

Installing the Microsoft packet scheduler, or some UNIX box with a real netowrking stack that you can exercise fine control over packet priority, as some people have suggested, isn't really going to fix your problem, except by maybe 10% (the exact amount depends on your average outbound payload size relative to an "empty" ACK-only packet).

This is because the problem is the queued data in the transmit buffer in the rate limiting device not containing your ACK's for inbound data.

Really, the TCP/IP protocol wasn't built for asymmetric reates, without equally asymmetric data transfers.

Effectively, you need to be able to control the transmission of data packets from your end based on knowledge of how full the input buffor on the outbound leg for the rate limiting device gets, so that you can throttle your data payload packets accordingly, to keep that buffer as empty as possible.

The only way you can really do this is to put code in your stack to monitor the advertised window from the other side, and the locally classify outbound packets as to whether or not they contain data payload, or are merely acks. You basically have to avoid filling the outbound queue on the rate limiter above 50%.

In an ideal world, the machine doing the rate limiting would do this for you. Some rate limiting machines for asynchronous connection do this, and it's not a problem (you can see the posts from the people who are rate limited, and don't understand your problem). But those machines are more expensive, and it's just as well for the provider if you feel pain as feedback for uploading, since it serves their purpose in providing you asymmetric service in the first place.

The problem's a lot easier when you are trying to avoid filling the inbound receive buffer for a router with a speed differential on one side (e.g. the inbound receive buffer on a router connected to a dialup modem bank, with a customer on a modem wanting to do QoS based on protocol type, so their SSH didn't lock up when an FTP or large HTTP transfer started up). *That's* where things like "AltQ" and the Microsoft packet scheduling engine become useful... not here.

-- Terry

Just change the TCP maximum receive window

[Animats]

OK, let's look at what's going on here. The downlink is being underutilized when the uplink is saturated. That just looks to TCP like a link with a long round-trip time, which TCP can handle. But the Windows default configuration isn't set up for it.

Try changing your local TCP buffering parameters instead to allow a bigger receive window. Set DefaultRcvWindow to something like 32768; the default is 8192, which is low for a DSL line, especially one that asymmetrical. With a bigger setting, you can have more data in flight, which makes the TCP connection more tolerant of delays in ACK return.

Given the numbers you're reporting, your ACK delay isn't that severe. You're only losing 2/3 of your downstream bandwidth. So quadrupling the amount of data allowed in flight should overcome that problem. Prioritizing your uplink traffic should be unnecessary at this time.

A real question to ask is "why are you trying to run a server on a 96Kb/s line". Buy hosting from somebody; it's cheap and they'll have far more bandwidth.

Setting up Win2K/XP for broadband

[rabtech]

You can play with these settings to get the best performance, but in general these should help out some.

Note that, at most, simply disable then re-enable the network adapter in question. No rebooting should be required to make any of this take effect.

Keys: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Tcpip\Parameters

GlobalMaxTCPWindowSize:DWORD = 256960
This should be a multiple of MSS, which is generally MTU - 40. Best results - pick a multiple of MSS lower than 16-bit (65535) times a scale factor that's a power of two. In other words, pick any multiple of MSS as long as it's under 65535, them multiply that by any power of two to arrive at the TCP Window size (RWIN).

Tcp1323Opts:DWORD = 1
This enables RFC 1323 options, which allows for a TCP RWIN greater than 64k. If you don't do this, most of the other settings are bunk as they will be limited by the 64k RWIN value.

EnablePMTUDiscovery:DWORD = 1
Enables automatic discovery of the MTU for your line, with the MSS set appropriately. You can set this to "0" to force your own value (see below).

TcpMaxDupAcks:DWORD = 2 (range from 1 to 3)
Number of duplicate ACKs recv'd for the same seq number of sent data before fast retrans is triggered.

NOW on to the MTU: it must be set on a per-interface basis. Find your TCP/IP interface associated with your NIC under Parameters\Interfaces\

MTU:DWORD = 1500 (probably... depends on your provider.)

On an unrelated note, you can force IE to hit up a web server with more connections than normal, which can help web pages load more concurrently.

it's under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Internet Settings\

MaxConnectionsPerServer:DWORD = 20
MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server:DWORD = 20

First is HTTP1.1+ servers, the other is HTTP1.0 servers. Specifies the max # of connections IE will open to a single web server in the process of downloading a page.

Re:Build a Linux box, use QoS and cbq.init

[Wesley Felter]

Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control

The Wonder Shaper