2009-12-03

so what's this net_cls thing actually useful for?

Anand came to #cslounge today with an interesting question: is there a logical equivalent of nice for network bandwidth management that i can easily apply to a process? I don't like being unable to browse the web or irc when I scp large amounts of stuff.

I was under the impression that there didn't actually exist a subsystem for controlling that sort of thing, only for "classifying" it - the net_cls subsystem has one control file, which is "classid", and it lets you specify a network class for each cgroup, and it doesn't seem to do much because it doesn't have anything hooking into it because it's a module. Then I found this, which explains the actual secret: each classid can be associated with sockets held by tasks in those cgroups, and then from -userspace- have bandwidth throttling administered! Very slick, and keeps the kernel-side labour to a minimum, so much so that it can even be modularized.

Of course, Anand's particular situation had an easier solution, which is the -l option to scp which lets you specify a bandwidth limit explicitly.

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