Customizing Bandwidth Usage

brflem — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:27:00 GMT

First of all, apologies for not having introduced myself in my first post. My name is Bryan and I am a Program Manager Intern on the IIS team. In my "real life," I am an undergraduate student pursuing a double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. I have been at Microsoft since mid-May 2007.

I have already posted about delivering on-demand media more efficiently, because users often do not watch entire videos. Download throttling for media is one of the things we are currently working on for our upcoming Media Pack.

There is also another way to limit bandwidth use in IIS. IIS6 and IIS7 allow an administrator to set a limit on the total bandwidth that can be used at the site and server levels. This existing functionality has some interesting applications, but it is not a very good solution to the media problem.

Where the existing bandwidth throttling might make sense is in a shared hosting scenario. To ensure no one site incurs heavy traffic that could use all of a server's bandwidth, you could set a bandwidth limit of 80% of that server's total bandwidth for each site on the box. That way no single site could ever be allowed to use enough bandwidth to completely choke out others.

Setting a bandwidth limit can also potentially lower bandwidth cost, if the bill is somehow based on the peak or "average peak" bandwidth used. Throttling allows an administrator to ensure that the bandwidth used never exceeds a set maximum, which can also mean that the bill will not exceed a set maximum. Setting a limit to control cost can be especially beneficial for a server that routinely sends large files to clients with very fast connections, generating very high bandwidth usage for extended periods of time.

Many folks are surprised to learn about the existing bandwidth limit feature, and I wanted to put it out into the community a little louder. In the IIS Manager, select a site or server, and then click on "Limits..." under "Configure" in the Actions panel.

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Customizing Bandwidth Usage