Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, so my appologies if this ins't an appropriate post.
I was wondering if there was a piece of software (or hardware perhaps) that is capable of assigning limits on the use of your internet connection bandwidth, either proportionally or in absolute values. For example, I like to browse the internet but usually have another program downloading files in the background. Naturally, the page loading of the internet is slower than I'd prefer due to the downloads that are going on at the same time. What I'm looking for is something that keeps an eye on what you're doing an then limit each programs use of the total bandwidth available. So while I'm activley browsing the net it knows to give say 80% of the bandwidth to IE. Then if it detects no internet use (like while you're reading the page or making a cup of tea) it would then re-adjust and increase how much bandwidth the 'download program' can use to ensure all the bandwidth is being used efficiently. You could assign it proportional values, ie 80% / 20% splits of the total bandwitdth or absolute limits like MAX: 20k/s for a certain program.
Ok, so I could get round this by turning off programs manually, but that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid, since a PC is way better at automatically optimising complex systems than I am. The above example was a simple one with only 2 programs using the connection, but add in a few more programs that could be running all at once and it doesn't run quite as efficiently as I'd like it to.
While my request is for my home PCs another example of this is at my place of work where we have 2 LANs joined togther and also have some specialist software that is used down this link to the server on the other LAN. People are often complaining if there's a lot of internet traffic (also going down this link) that this specialist software slows down due to it's remote network access times. A similar idea could be used here to isolate/prioritise bandwidth for these software users alone regardless of what internet traffic is occuring.
Has anyone heard of something that is capable of such a task, am I missing something that is so simple and is already in use or is what I'm asking for impractical for technical reasons?
I hope I've explained things well enough and I look forward to your replies.
Thanks for your time.
Marc
I was wondering if there was a piece of software (or hardware perhaps) that is capable of assigning limits on the use of your internet connection bandwidth, either proportionally or in absolute values. For example, I like to browse the internet but usually have another program downloading files in the background. Naturally, the page loading of the internet is slower than I'd prefer due to the downloads that are going on at the same time. What I'm looking for is something that keeps an eye on what you're doing an then limit each programs use of the total bandwidth available. So while I'm activley browsing the net it knows to give say 80% of the bandwidth to IE. Then if it detects no internet use (like while you're reading the page or making a cup of tea) it would then re-adjust and increase how much bandwidth the 'download program' can use to ensure all the bandwidth is being used efficiently. You could assign it proportional values, ie 80% / 20% splits of the total bandwitdth or absolute limits like MAX: 20k/s for a certain program.
Ok, so I could get round this by turning off programs manually, but that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid, since a PC is way better at automatically optimising complex systems than I am. The above example was a simple one with only 2 programs using the connection, but add in a few more programs that could be running all at once and it doesn't run quite as efficiently as I'd like it to.
While my request is for my home PCs another example of this is at my place of work where we have 2 LANs joined togther and also have some specialist software that is used down this link to the server on the other LAN. People are often complaining if there's a lot of internet traffic (also going down this link) that this specialist software slows down due to it's remote network access times. A similar idea could be used here to isolate/prioritise bandwidth for these software users alone regardless of what internet traffic is occuring.
Has anyone heard of something that is capable of such a task, am I missing something that is so simple and is already in use or is what I'm asking for impractical for technical reasons?
I hope I've explained things well enough and I look forward to your replies.
Thanks for your time.
Marc
