Matt wrote:
What is considered a large number of connections?
How many connections is it safe to limit to, without compromising a user's
typical usage.
My nephew and I occassionally play BF2142 online. My Linksys DD-WRT
based router had a problem. It had max ports set out 512. When my PC
then his polled hundreds of servers to find the best connection it hit
that limit. Raising it to 1024 seemed to fix it.
So limiting connections will likely smack gamers as well as p2p users.
For that matter, it can easily kill legitimate traffic.
For a while, I toyed with setting a limit of, say, 24 simultaneous
connections per client IP address. Then I found out folks use Firefox
and set it to open a dozen tabs when launched, oh and they all use the
"FasterFox" extension that ignores browser politeness, downloading 20
and 30 files from a given Web server at once, and pre-caching links
you're likely to click on.
Those little bursts of traffic look, from the tower's point of view,
very much like bursty P2P traffic. If you're just going by "number of
TCP connections" or "number of packets in a given window of time" you'll
have far too many false positives.
Generally, this kind of traffic is perfectly alright anyway. If someone
hammers the tower for half a second, that's okay, nobody will really
even notice. It's when someone is hammering the tower for hours at a
time that people start to call and complain.
The best (or the least-bad) solution for this really is packet
inspection to identify and limit the p2p-style traffic. We may hate it
from a lot of perspectives, but from the "keeping your network running
well and keeping your subscribers happy" perspective it's pretty much
the only viable choice right now.
David Smith
MVN.net
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