On 8/30/2011 8:21 PM, Nathan Eisenberg wrote: > It seems like there are always questions and/or complaints on this list, so I > just wanted to share a success story. > > We just returned (this weekend) from running the PC gaming network at Penny > Arcade eXpo's west coast event. This is a rather high profile event attended > by 60,000+ people, with the PC gaming room being divided into two sections - > PC Freeplay, with Intel powered machines donated by Intel themselves, and > BYOC, which is more like a regular LAN party where people bring their own > rigs. They both share a common internal network (/22) so that they can play > games with eachother.
Awesome! > One of the major issues this event has always faced is bandwidth. The > convention center's bandwidth is extraordinarily expensive, so the event is > only able to afford a 45Mbps connection (for 500-600 gaming PC's). This > connection has to support regular web browsing, email, IM, etc, as well as > game traffic AND game patch traffic (ala Steam and Battle.NET). Further > complicating matters, at some points, there are also video streams and > tournaments with real money riding on them, which have to run smoothly. > Up till now, this has always been accomplished with traffic shaper rules, but > these are complex, and difficult to explain to others. They're also not easy > to adjust in an adhoc manner. This year, we tried out the bandwidth limiter > feature, and basically created different buckets for the protocols and ports > we wanted to allow. This made it extremely easy to make sure that there was > ALWAYS bandwidth available for the PC attached to a projector showing a video > stream, and that the people playing in the Starcraft 2 tournament had enough > bandwidth to log on. It was easy to tweak and adjust as the demands evolved. > So, to whoever built that feature- THANK YOU! Yes the limiters are a very easy way to setup containers for bandwidth and impose limits for a group or per-IP limits as well. Some (like you) have found it an easier alternative to achieving bandwidth guarantees than traditional shaping rules, and they fill in a few gaps where those make things difficult/impossible. > My one bit of feedback: The 'Limiter Info' page is currently *very* hard to > decipher. It would be quite nice if there was a readily available breakdown > (maybe in graph form, too?) of the different limiters and their utilization. That might be doable for the future. It being a new feature things are still a little rough in the reporting department. We are moving to jQuery for pfSense 2.1 so I imagine someone will turn up a nice graphing widget we can use to make that a bit easier to read. > Pics (apologies for the shameless plug - it's the only location that I have > them available at): > http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150348477738933.398042.102500853932 > > PS - you can't see it due to the contrast, but on the picture with the rack > and monitor, that monitor was showing the realtime bandwidth utilization (the > SVG graph thingy), and people seemed to think that was pretty neat! > PPS - Oh, here's one where you CAN see it, kinda: > http://hphotos-snc7.fbcdn.net/322411_10150348722388933_102500853932_9609136_7921564_o.jpg The real time graphs are always a hit. :-) Thanks for sharing! Jim --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: support-unsubscr...@pfsense.com For additional commands, e-mail: support-h...@pfsense.com Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
