ethernet speed limit

[Jeff Silverman]

Kjell Konis wrote:

> Is there any way limit ethernet speeds?  Basically what I want to do is
> alias my ethernet interface (ie eth0:1, eth0:2, etc) then have eth0:x
> limited to 256kbps.  TIA.
>
> Kjell

Why would you want to?

Ethernet is multiple access, so if you want to limit the amount of
bandwidth a single communications channel uses, you have to throttle the
channel somehow.   That isn't always easy.  When I was at Mathsoft, we had
a backup system which was multithreaded and it would saturate the
ethernet.  A bunch of processes scheduled for midnight would be unable to
function because there were a lot of network delays.  We finally
rescheduled all of the "midnight" processes for 23:50 and we rescheduled
the backups to stagger their starting times.  The network would be busy
from about 21:00 until 24:00, and then it would saturate until about 06:30
the next morning and taper off to no load by 7:30.  But that was all done
at the application level.


Jeff


--
Jeff Silverman, sysadmin for the Research Computing Systems (RCS)
University of Washington, School of Engineering, Electrical Engineering Dept.
Box 352500, Seattle, WA, 98125-2500
jeffs at isdl.ee.washington.edu
http://rcs.ee.washington.edu/BRL/people/jeffs/


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