NetEqualizer News Blog

E-Sports in schools is becoming mainstream. You can make a living at it as well. Having the right amount of bandwidth for it is essential. It doesn’t matter if that bandwidth is in-house on a LAN situation or over the Internet. Playing or even practicing suffers when a game doesn’t get what it needs. (for you readers on the other side of the coin that need to make sure other things get done without gaming interfering keep reading too :)

Believe it or not, playing games online was one of the reasons I got interested in bandwidth management!

Every FPS (first person shooter) player wants to have a gaming experience where the only reason they lose is because they met someone better than them. You don’t want to lose because you see your screen freeze waiting for the next packet to arrive to refresh the screen.

I dove into learning as much about Internet/Networking as I could so I could try and get the best setup I could for my network. I ran my own servers so I could control some of that. I never played on the same network as the server back then because that wouldn’t be fair to others. Running my own servers I could also see what else was going on with the network traffic.

I knew how much my servers needed per person to play like they should so I knew that 8 or 16 players would take a certain amount of bandwidth. I knew how much total bandwidth I had for the network. What I didn’t know was how much all the other machines on the network was using and how.

With NetEqualizer you can easily see how much every IP is using. That’s every connection an IP has and how much it is using, that’s the important part. You can tell if your mail server is getting hit hard, or the web server is uploading/downloading huge objects to some offsite IP. If needed you can put connection limits on things with NetEqualizer.

You can also provide priority over getting equalized by the NetEqualizer for your gaming server IP. Even though you have priority on it you can still have a total amount it can use hard limit on it.

In a setting where you want to play games during certain hours you can have rules that go on and come off at different times. For instance if you are in a high school that provides E-Sports gaming then it can be setup so that the administrative IPs all have priority from 8am to 2pm but after that you can take it off and let E-Sports have a bit more priority so you don’t end up getting LAG!

NetEqualizer works both ways, it can be used to give administration priority when you want it to be the most important traffic on the network or you can give programs like E-Sports more priority so your gaming does not suffer when its necessary.

NetEqualizer strives to be a set and forget type of bandwidth manager but it has a lot for the ones that need micro manage it as well. You can set hard limits on IPs, create Pools which have a certain amount of bandwidth and then stick IPs into those pools as members so all the IPs in the pool can use up to the pools specified hard limit. You can set connection limits on IPs. Also the default task of the NetEqualizer is to equalize. If placed on a network without any configuration besides telling it how much in and out bandwidth you have it will monitor all connections from all IPs it sees and when RATIO of incoming or outgoing bandwidth is reached it looks for all connections over a value we call HOGMIN and slows those large connections down so the rest of the connections on the network don’t suffer. A real simple example is if you
are on a standard VoIP call which only uses a few hundred K of bandwidth and someone on the network decides to start downloading a high def movie file from the web. Without NetEqualizer its anyones guess what will happen to the VoIP call. With NetEqualizer its predetermined what will happen. First thing it does is see if there is any reason to look for connections to equalize. If you are no where need your bandwidth ceiling then it does nothing and keeps monitoring. Both your VoIP and download should go along like NetEqualizer wasn’t there. Now if NetEqualizer sees that you are near your ceiling on total bandwidth that you told it you have then it looks for all connections over HOGMIN. Every connection that doesn’t specifically have a priority rule for it will be slowed down by a few milliseconds and this will happen for as long as the bandwidth is near saturation. When a connection is equalized we don’t just do it and leave it that way. We do it in stages so things like fragile FTP servers don’t just drop the connection. We put on a small delay and then in a second or so we check again and if it still needs equalizing and still a connection we put on a bit more and then we do the same routine one more time if things are still needing equalizing. Then we take it completely off and start all over in another second or two.

The NetEqualizer equalizes a connection from one IP to another IP. So if your web server is uploading a file to some IP and its huge then it may be equalized for that connection. The other 100’s or 1000’s of connections to your web server would not be equalized unless they were also over HOGMIN and there was a need to equalize. The same applies to any IP no matter if it belongs to your mail servers or game servers or testing servers. As mentioned above, you can set priority for things like video servers you push out to the world and know those streams would be over HOGMIN but are important enough to mandate they have no equalizing on them.