time-based bandwidth throttling

acrophile
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:44 pm

time-based bandwidth throttling

Post by acrophile »

Hello all,

I have another new feature to suggest. Many ISP's (mostly Cable ones) are starting to throttle bandwidth at certain times of the day. My provider throttles my connection from 4PM to 12PM if I've hit a certain download threshold over the past 24 hours or something... I go from 8megs to 2megs for those 8 hours.

When they're throttling my connection and I'm downloading from usenet, overwhelms my internet connection to the point that browsing the web becomes painfully slow. To mitigate the problem I set UE to throttle at 50KB/s or so.

So... it would be awesome if UE could have a setting to automatically throttle the speed during certain times of the day.

Thoughts?

-acrophile
jonib
Posts: 397
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 8:46 pm
Location: Sweden

Re: time-based bandwidth throttling

Post by jonib »

acrophile wrote:So... it would be awesome if UE could have a setting to automatically throttle the speed during certain times of the day.

Thoughts?
Hi acrophile.

I believe Menu->Edit->Properties->Scheduler does what you want.

This is a section from "Help notes".

Code: Select all

Scheduler

	Scheduler can be used to suspend tasks beyond intervals of activity or the opposite - to limit bandwidth at certin 
	time intervals depending on settings in properties->scheduler. when 'suspend tasks' checked - tasks will be suspended
	beyond the time intervals of activity, when checked - depending on bandwidth settings in properties->scheduler and
	properties->tasks (empty means unlimited) scheduler will allow more or less bandwidth at certain times.
jonib
acrophile
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:44 pm

Post by acrophile »

Wow, I feel like a moron!

Thanks for the tip! :)
acrophile
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:44 pm

Post by acrophile »

Ok, well I think I figured it out... despite not having any clue how to configure the scheduler (it's not very intuitive and the help notes didn't well... help), I set up every day in the list to throttle between 16:00-24:00 (that took a bit of trial and error)... seems like that interface needs a lot of work... I don't see the value in scheduling specific days (the next 365 days to be exact) instead of a simple "Everyday" or "Weekdays" or SMTWThFSa kind of thing.

Perhaps we can rename this thread "Scheduler Improvement Suggestion" hehe...

Anyway, thanks again for your help... I guess I'll have to remember in a year to update my scheduler. :)
dengle
Posts: 274
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2003 2:37 pm

Post by dengle »

Please note that if the scheduler is active, the pause button will not... well... pause.
acrophile
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:44 pm

Post by acrophile »

dengle wrote:Please note that if the scheduler is active, the pause button will not... well... pause.
nice... :)

oh well I don't really use that anyway... I just want it to throttle...
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

the pause button still works when scheduler is enabled for both active and non-active intervals (i've checked it now, don't know why it could be assumed it might not work).

as to weekdays there is a way to set it using the "propagate" button encircled in the "weekdays" rectangle.

e.g. you want to set 0-24 for saturday and sunday.

you select some Sat and Sun entry then you type "0-24" if e.g. Sun is selected 0-24 will appear in Sun, press "copy" and "paste" to set it for "Sat" as well. then click "propagate" and the time will appear for every Saturday and Sunday in the list.

or you can set time for every day of the week (using copy/paste or not), then select the days and click propagate, just don't select same days of different weeks since the propagate button will be greyed out then, the principle is it takes settings from selected entry and set the time for the same day in the table (monday settings -> for all mondays, tuesday settings for all tuesdays etc).

the table size is currently for half a year.
borek
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Oct 03, 2008 7:29 am

Scheduler and multiple time slots per day

Post by borek »

Alex,

this is a great program, thank you.

How do I define mutiple time slots per day in the scheduler?

On weekdays I need to download between 00:00-08:00 and then 22:00-23:59.

Is there a delimeter character I can use or an offset on the following days slot?
Josef K
Posts: 534
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 7:29 pm

Post by Josef K »

Use a comma, in another post I gave an example.

Instead of using 22:00-23:59 you can use 22:00-24:00, otherwise UE will pause for one minute.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

you can use anything, actually you just type time intervals and you see resulting time intervals added in the list for the focused entry as you type them, you can use space or other separators, as long as it accepts it and you see the intended time intervals appearing in the list.

for example if you enter 7-14 and 10-17 it will recombine them into 7-17

then you can use copy/paste and propagate buttons to set it at once for half a year ahead.
acrophile
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:44 pm

Post by acrophile »

Hi, I was just perusing around here again wondering if there was any news on the scheduler. It sure would be nice to have a proper scheduler built-in. My ISP throttles my bandwidth from 5pm to midnight and I'd like to just configure UE to not download anything during this time, or at least throttle the speed.

Several other news readers seem to have this functionality so it's surprising that UE doesn't since it is so much more powerful overall than the others.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

scheduler is extremely easy to use.

open edit menu->properties->scheduler. check "enable scheduler" and uncheck "disable scheduler on start"

now e.g. you don't want UE to download from 5pm to midnight

select any day (but not the topmost day which is "today" since the time may be truncated with the current time).

type 0-17 in the edit field. you'll see 00:00-17:00 appearing in the list control.

press "copy", select all items, then press "paste". you'll see 00-17 everywhere in the list.

check "suspend tasks" in the "non-active" interval control area.

then since the non-active interval will be from 5pm to midnight tasks will be suspended during that time.
acrophile
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:44 pm

Post by acrophile »

Thanks Alex as always!!!

But I disagree that it's easy to use... it's not intuitive at all.

Also, this will only be good for 6 months and then UE will forget my settings and I will have forgotten (again) how you're supposed to set them up.

It seems like there should be a better way to schedule the days instead of just a list of every day in the next 6 months. Probably don't need anything fancy, but at least something that won't forget its settings.

Anyway, that's just my opinion... you can totally tell me to shove off! :D
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

scheduler is an older code, it dates back to the modem age, then newspro had also RAS connect/disconnect option, it reflects users demands from that time, for UE i didn't include the modem code.

currently very few people mention scheduler.

if to base it on the day of the week it will be difficult to see the whole list easily, say someone goes on a trip and wants to run full throttle at night and 80% bandwidth during day hours in auto/watch mode the current setup is preferrable.

i can easily increase it to one year or add some "lock" option to limit it to one week/day and propagate automatically future days which come into visible scope, an hour of work, but in short the feature is almost not mentioned, if many providers will routinelly limit bandwidth it may change, but unlikely it will be a big trend since they also compete among themselves and adding restrictions may result in losing customers.
Josef K
Posts: 534
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 7:29 pm

Post by Josef K »

alex wrote:...if many providers will routinelly limit bandwidth it may change, but unlikely it will be a big trend since they also compete among themselves and adding restrictions may result in losing customers.
The Scheduler is still a very relevant part of UE for me. I was using it every day up until a few months ago but I forsee a time when I may need to use it again.

To explain: My ISP uses what they call Traffic Management. Their whiny little excuse is so that the few heavy downloaders don't affect the speeds of the many light users. More information can be found here. Also on that page is the reason why I don't currently need scheduler. In the table there is a listing of all the speeds offered by my ISP - I have the tasty unfettered one on the far right of that table. Previously I had the 20Mb which had traffic management. What I had to do was to calculate the speed I would need to set to still be able to download but without overshooting their limits. This wasn't perfect because the limits change for different amounts of time during the day. It was a balance of setting the speed for both periods during the day where each period has a different length of time and a different download allowance.

This leads on to my next thought: In this modern age where traffic shaping is becoming more the norm, how about a scheduler that accounts for this? For example, using my ISPs 20Mb account, you could set 10:00-15:00 to allow no more than 7000MB to download. Then between 16:00-21:00, allow no more than 3500MB to download. Tweaking this with a user-changeable value, e.g. 10% of the data size would allow general web/email usage within those times and can be treated as an overhead - 'just in case'.

For now, this doesn't apply to me but since my ISP has trialled both 100Mb and 200Mb connections, I can see that I won't be at the top of the tree forever and will be subjected to the whining of the traffic management police. When I did need the scheduler during my time on 20Mb, figuring out how to download as much as I could without exceeding any limits was a slight torment.
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