2p2 traffic and network performance
 

Hi all,

I frequently have a p2p application running in the background, either Azureus or aMule -- sometimes both -- but I am careful never to allocate more than 80% of my upload speed to them to ensure that network latency remains optimal. Nonetheless, I find that p2p traffic tends to slow down browsing; sites take longer to load and even timeout.

I am pretty sure my router is not a bottleneck; I am using a 1.6 GHZ Pentium IV as a home router/gateway/WAP running FreeBSD. My ADSL modem is in so-called ZIPB-mode, a kind of half-bridge setup whereby it is not doing any NAT.

At the moment, my F8 client has around a thousand connections open:
As many of you will know, this is typical with p2p. My network should be able to handle it -- or not?

Can anyone recommend techniques for analyzing network latency and so forth? I'd like to optimize my browsing experience, if need be at the cost of p2p throughput.

Thanks.

if you want the router to be able to allocate enough bandwidth to browsing, you need to set up QoS on the router

Ok, I anticipated this answer. Unfortunately, the FreeBSD kernel doesn't support traffic shaping out of the box; I need to recompile it, which I will do, as soon as I sort out another unrelated issue.

In the meantime, can you give me an idea, schematically speaking, of what the general approach would be? Would one prioritize by type of packet, ie BT, or outgoing ACK? Incoming HTTP? I'm new to QoS, so any tips would be appreciated.

I recently configured a checkpoint splat server with the following settings:
20% p2p for specified clients
30% VoIP
10% FTP
40% HTTP(+S)

basically just went with my own needs, filtering by protocol type (ed2k/http/https/voip/etc)

there was a good tutorial on how to do that on kadets.info, if you understand Russian