Best / Quickest Practice to Limit Devices Bandwidth?
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Hey there,
Pre-warning: I'm new to pfSense but have a fair amount of networking experience.
My use case is an ADSL line with approx 16Mbps down and 4Mbps Up.
I have 13 gamers coming with PCs and mobile phones to destroy the internet with windows updates, automatic game patching, 4K Waterfalls on youtube etc.Ideally I just want to limit every device to a maximum 3Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up, this would be enough for browsing and gaming traffic and it would only saturate their own connection (i.e. other uses latency won't be affected) if they hit the limit. It's unlike there would be enough users accidentally/intentionally uploading/downloading enough to saturate the entire WAN connection.
I don't want to do anything on a per MAC/IP basis, just a global rule.I've somewhat achieved this using Floating Rules with Limiters in Firewall -> Traffic Shaper but I'm wondering if there are any other/better methods to go about achieving this?
Thank in advance.
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Latency is only affected because of bufferbloat. You could try to limit everyone's bandwidth, but fixing the bufferbloat can get you the 80/20 with little effort, fewer edge cases, and reduced complexity.
The currently simplest way is to enable FairQ as the shaper on LAN and WAN interfaces, configure the default queue on the interfaces to have Codel enabled, and to set the bandwidth to some value less than what real bandwidth you have.
In the near future, scheduled for 2.4.4, fq_Codel should be superior and easier to setup.
This is just an alternative that you may want to try.