How to share available bandwidth equally between my users

[nikkilocke]

I have 16 users connected to my pfSense single-LAN, 3-WAN router.
The 3 WAN ports connect to ADSL lines giving about 4Mb/s down, 800kb/s up each.

I would like to prevent any one user hogging the available bandwidth, while at the same time allowing a user to saturate the link if they are the only one using it.

I guess I need traffic shaping. But search the web as I might, I can find no clue how to do this, unless I set up 16 separate incoming and outgoing queues (and set up more queues if we get a new user).

I did try using the traffic shaper wizard, but its output makes no sense to me at all. I just went through without separating out any specific traffic for high or low priority, and it produced this:

Bandwidth Priority Service curve
WAN1 800 Kb/s
qACK 20 % 6 - - 20%
qDefault 10% 3
WAN2 800 Kb/s
qACK 20 % 6 - - 20%
qDefault 10% 3
WAN3 800 Kb/s
qACK 20 % 6 - - 20%
qDefault 10% 3
LAN
qLink 10% 2
qInternet 10752 Kb/s - - 10752Kb
qACK 20% 6 - - 20%

All this seems to achieve is to cut the available bandwidth to about 30% of what it was. Which, in view of the total of the % bandwidths for each queue, is perhaps not surprising!

Also, I can't find any firewall rules that directs traffic into these queues - does that mean none are needed if I don't have different queues for different types of traffic?

Are there any experts out there I could pay to show me how to set this up?

[podilarius]

If you put all traffic in one queue, the the bandwidth assigned to that queue is shared. In 2.0 and higher you will find the rules in the floating that directs traffic into queues. I separate my traffic by priority. Http, smtp, VoIP, and https have the highest priority while all other traffic goes to lower queues. You don't need to create multiple queues for each user. I have never setup this with multi wan, so I don't really know how much it differs.

[nikkilocke]

I can see 2 queues for each wan interface, and 3 for the lan, as shown in my post. There are no rules in floating.
It's all confusing, and pretty meaningless to me at present.

[podilarius]

Then you set them up as default queues and traffic will end up in the default queues even without the rules.
Did you go to Status -> Queues to see if the traffic was going into the queues? Are you not getting the full WAN bandwidth?
I would try setting bandwidth to 70% on the WAN for default and qLink to 70% on LAN, but only if you are seeing bandwidth issues.

[nikkilocke]

Why qLink? What's that queue for?
How do I know what packets go into what queue?

I am guessing (due to the lack of documentation) that outgoing packets for each WAN go through the qACK queue if they are below a certain size, or through the qDefault queue otherwise.

No idea what incoming packets will be doing.

No idea how a queue on my LAN port will slow down the packets coming in on the WAN ports.

[chuksonpfsense]

I'm having similar problem.

I limited bandwidth to a maximum of 256/128kbps per IP using Limiters. But this does not help me at times especially when you have say only two (2) users using the internet, it means they will still be limited to 256/128kbps when we have a 1mb/512kbps link.

How do i achieve dynamic limiting such that even though a user is limited to 256/128, if he is the only person online he can utilize the entire bandwidth of 1mb/512kbps? If you have two people limited to 256/128 each, the 512/256Kbps available will be share between them equally.

I will appreciate any suggestion please

[myke]

Hello,

I've got the Pfsense 2.0.3 and i'll try to share bandwith per user but it seems to be impossible.

In the forum, a lot of thread talk about this problem but no one have the solution.

If someone found the solution, it will be great to help  ;D

Thanks.
Myke.

[kathampy]

@chuksonpfsense:

I'm having similar problem.

I limited bandwidth to a maximum of 256/128kbps per IP using Limiters. But this does not help me at times especially when you have say only two (2) users using the internet, it means they will still be limited to 256/128kbps when we have a 1mb/512kbps link.

How do i achieve dynamic limiting such that even though a user is limited to 256/128, if he is the only person online he can utilize the entire bandwidth of 1mb/512kbps? If you have two people limited to 256/128 each, the 512/256Kbps available will be share between them equally.

I will appreciate any suggestion please

I think you have to choose between sharing bandwidth between users evenly or prioritising based on traffic. I don't think you can do both on one pfSense box at the same time. To dynamically split bandwidth between users just create a queue for each user and give them 1% link share each.

[podilarius]

yes, limiters and traffic shaping in pfsense are 2 separate things. What you are looking for seems to be traffic shaping. I don't know much about limiters only that they are rather dumb in what they do. Meaning they just limit bandwidth based on an overall. Traffic shaper I think would be a better fit for what you are trying to accomplish.