How to limit network bandwidth?

Question

Problem: We are hosting an application on remote server. We need to test it with a limited network bandwidth (for users with bad Internet access).

Question: Can I limit my internet bandwidth (in Fedora 14)? For instance: 128 KB per second.

Answer 1

You can throttle the network bandwidth on the interface using the command called tc Man page available at http://linux.die.net/man/8/tc

A useful script is found at

http://atmail.com/kb/2009/throttling-bandwidth/

Or for more simple, use wondershaper:

http://jwalanta.blogspot.com/2009/04/easy-bandwidth-shaping-in-linux.html

Answer 2

If you already have an Apache setup somewhere, you can use mod_bw, which also works on proxied connections (i.e. Apache just forwards everything to the proper server, but slows the responses down.)

Answer 3

Limiting network resources based on some criterias is the subject of QoS. There are several different ways to control user traffic on Linux systems.

There is a good How-to about advanced routing techniques and traffic control on Linux by Bert Hubert.

Answer 4

Dummynet does what you want and more, you can even control the latency, random packet loss and lots more.

Answer 5

If your application is exposed via http/https then you can use firefox-throttle else use NIST which is a network emulation package.