Networks Prioritising network traffic

Hi all,

I'm pretty fed up of crap scored on COD because my router doesn't understand that game packets are more important than streamed video packets. Does anyone know of a way, software or hardware, to make it prioritise some programs over others? I'm hoping the answer is yes, given that this is an absolute requirement of any decent network, and given the insane amount of money pumped into network hardware development

 

I keep posting this but netlimiter

http://netlimiter.com/

you can disable windows firewall too, has limits, grants, and firewall for local and internet traffic.. used it for years and it works on win 7

 

Cool, thanks. Looks similar to NetBalancer that I've just downloaded to test out?

Is it like NetBalancer - allows prioritising of programs on one PC, but not PCs in a network. My aim is to make COD as smooth as possible on my PC while mon fille is watching SeeSaw downstairs (I've tried disconnecting her, mixted results).

 

yeah you have to install it on all machines in the lan.. like on browsers I have them limited to 9KB up 95KB down and that's good enough for movies on hulu or youtube/ect..

or you can cap a rig to a certain bandwidth.. works great for gaming and apps that don't have their own bandwidth control

I haven't run netbalancer.. netlimiter has been around- they were the first

still remember when it was in beta and free =] has grants also, so you can cap a rig and then allocate the bandwidth within that cap between apps

 

Sounds good, I'll try it so if I've got an 8meg connection say, I can give 7 megs to pc downstairs for videos, 1 meg to upstairs, but will it always prioritise that 1meg above the 7?

 

Why not use QoS on the router? Set games as high priority, streaming video as medium, etc.

 

I was thinking that, but the only option I can see is QOS: Enable/Disable. It's a Belkin N1 Vision F5D8632-4A.

 

yeah you can cut up the bandwidth perfectly like that.. klutch has a point about qos prioritizing if your just using it for gaming

but with movies.. I'm not sure if that would work cause they tend to saturate all the bandwidth.. netlimiter will limit it at the app level.. you can't control the speed of incoming data with qos

anyways been using it for years and I game.. try it out and see what you think- not sure what the limits are on the free version

 

The problem with QoS is that it has no effect on the internet side, better to use something like netlimiter which caps the traffic at the workstation itself and prevents it from hogging too much bandwidth.

 

I'm not sure what you mean here. I have setup QoS and limited upload to 256 Kb/s for all devices out of the 1.5Mb/s available. Okay, I can't do this on a system by system basis and give another user 1Mb/s upload but in my instance it was the only solution to stopping massive torrent abuse which would bring the whole network to a halt.

If you have access to all the PC/Laptop then fine but I could not get access to the kids Laptops so I had to go the crude route. Plus there is nothing stopping a PS3/X-Box downloading torrents as the software mentioned will not work on them! With my solution it affected all devices regardless (including i-pods, PSPs, etc).

I guess the only perfect solution would be to have a network server/router device! (I'd love one of those...)

 

The internet doesn't have QoS, so while you can enforce it on your router, the fact is that effectively the traffic still comes down your broadband line when someone is downloading it, it just gets discarded and ignored at the router itself, in preference of the higher priority classes. The broadband line still gets saturated when someone kicks off a big download, as "the internet" doesn't care what you do with it when it gets there, it just sees a traffic request and sends it to the router.

Its my understanding that netlimiter affects the rate that traffic is requested and doesn't put this hit on the inbound traffic in the first place, but as I've never used it, I might be wrong.

Something else that the OP may need to consider is using a cat5e cable to connect to the router (if not already) as Wifi is a shared media, so if someone is streaming it'll contribute to poor responses also.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I understand now. But it still works if you follow it through logically:-

• Software on PC 1 starts massive torrents downloading (movies/games, etc.)
• Internet brings in data from all the seeds & the leeches upload from PC 1
• Router stops most of the upload going out to the internet apart from the 256Kb/s limit
• Internet leeches cannot then get data from PC 1 above the 256Kb/s limit
• Leeches then find another seed instead
• Traffic is kept manageable.

So the initial internet speeds get curtailed because there is a limit. With 50Mb/s Virgin cable it is never the download speeds that cause problems for me. One Laptop was downloading torrents and filled up the cable's current 1.5Mb/s upload speed. No other PC/devices could connect to the net because even basic internet traffic requires a certain small amount of upload for "hand-shaking".

There was no upload left! QoS cured this problem. Whatever it takes..

 

I definitely agree that QoS can cure outbound problems by dropping the transmit packets exceeding the allocation, I was more thinking about download transfer rate on incoming downloads.

The average internet download speed across the UK is supposed to be around 3.5mbps, which must make me quite average, because that's all I've got!!

For someone on 50mb a streaming video is easy-peasy, but not so much on 3.5!!

Some torrent software does have an in-built rate-limiter, but netlimiter is handy that it caps all traffic regardless of individual settings.

It looks like a combination of QoS AND a software solution like netlimiter in tandem will give the best coverage depending on the exact speed capacity of the OP's broadband link

 

I use uTorrent for teh torrentz and it does indeed have a limiter on upload and/or download, and on number of upload/download connections. However, I don't torrent while playing games anyway, it's the video streaming that needs combating.

Will try it tonight when I get home from work, fingers rossed netlimiter does the trick.

It's interesting, Netbalancer says that steam and mw2 upload and download in chunks of about 512 bytes, whereas something like SeeSaw is doing it in megabytes!

Fingers crossed it works