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Can you recommend a good bandwidth manager/limiter?

itylusitylus Registered User regular
edited February 2009 in Help / Advice Forum
I live in a house with various other people, with several computers on the same connection. Uh, anyway, I would like to download a huge file (enhanced edition of The Witcher, yay!) but without being an antisocial jerk and making the connection unusable for everyone else here... so, I need a bandwidth manager that will stop the computer I'm on from hogging the whole thing. I've had a look around and there are seemingly millions of the things but it's very hard for me as a non-expert to tell what's dodgy and what isn't, what will be hard to use and what will be simple and so on. So, any recommendations, very gratefully received.

Thanks!

itylus on

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    vonPoonBurGervonPoonBurGer Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    I usually use Free Download Manager for this sort of thing. It's free, it's open source under the GPL, it's spyware free and it's worked just fine for me. Of course, it will also let you manage bandwidth usage for the items it's downloading. You get three presets for bandwidth usage, Light, Medium and Heavy. Heavy uses every bit of bandwidth it can get its hands on, but Medium and Light let you specify a KB/s cap. If you correctly select your connection type (e.g. 1M DSL/Cable) it presets those to sane values for you.

    vonPoonBurGer on
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    PeregrineFalconPeregrineFalcon Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    If this is the STEAM version, you can also use the built-in bandwidth limiter (there is one, right? I seem to recall there being one.)

    PeregrineFalcon on
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    itylusitylus Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    Unfortunately, it's not the steam version.

    itylus on
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    vonPoonBurGervonPoonBurGer Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    wiigirl wrote: »
    You can do that with some routers with advanced QoS functionality.

    Try the D-Link DIR-825 Xtreme N QoS 4-Port Gigabit Switch Simultaneous Dual Band Draft 802.11n Router, it should do what you need it to, but it is like $119 on Amazon.
    You can do the same thing with cheaper routers if you use open source replacement firmware. I have it enabled on my Linksys WRT54GL, which costs around half of what you'd pay for a DIR-825. You don't need much hardware to do QoS, the consumer router vendors just like charging extra for enabling the feature. The only downsides are that flashing it with open source firmware probably voids the warranty, and there's a chance you can brick your router during the flash.

    A lot of the newer consumer routers aren't very open-source friendly, so you have to be careful if you do choose to buy one with the intention of flashing it. Linux-based units are generally far easier to flash, but they're getting less and less common since manufacturers are moving to VXWorks-based units with less RAM and flash storage to cut costs. The WRT54GL is a Linux-based version of the WRT54G, and it's extremely compatible with alternate firmwares like dd-wrt or Tomato. Personally, I think Tomato is fantastic, it runs extremely well on my router.

    Anyway, buying a new router is probably more than the OP wanted to get into for this particular task. If contention for bandwidth is a recurring issue in his household though, QoS is far and away the best solution. It moves the bandwidth management off the individual PCs and centralizes and automates it in the router. You never have to worry about whether or not your roommate remembered to cap his torrent speeds, QoS will automatically prioritize more latency-sensitive traffic ahead of bulk traffic like torrents or FTP as long as it's properly configured.

    vonPoonBurGer on
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    itylusitylus Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    It's not a recurring issue, but thanks for the info - might be useful in future.

    I ended up trying a bunch of different things and the one I liked best was "Traffic Shaper XP". So, for the moment I guess this thing is solved.

    Thanks to everyone who responded!

    itylus on
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