The next generation in bandwidth control

FAQ

What can it do, and what does it cost?

The "what can it do" is probably best explained by the main web site, but the bottom line is of course that it can save you money. It costs $150. You can also extend the free 30 day support with an annual support contract for $39 if you wish to.

Specifically, in my situation, I recently seem to have been hit by a bunch of one month signups that have spent every waking hour the whole month downloading (or maybe using automated downloaders).

This is exactly the problem Throttlebox is designed to address.

Can this tool set a global daily limit for each user on the site?

Yes.

Can it also used to pick on troublesome users on a one by one basis and be used to throttle them even further?

To some extent it does that automatically. If they exceeded the daily limit yesterday, today's limit will be lower because there isn't just a daily limit. Instead, Throttlebox takes the hourly and daily limits that you set and automatically determines the correct 48 hour limit, the correct 7 day limit, etc. For example, if you set a per hour limit of 500MB and a per day limit of 2GB, Throttlebox will determine that the 48 hour limit should be 3.5 GB. So if they hit the 2GB limit on day one, they are allowed only 1.5GB on day two. It's actually a continuous linear limit, as can be seen in this screenshot:
http://bettercgi.com/throttlebox/images/ruleEdit.png

Additionally, a simple script could be created that lets you manually specify certain users to be on the "watch" list, or on the "VIP" list. We call these different sets of rules for different sets of users "rulesets" and you can have as many different rulesets as you'd like. A little custom scripting will be needed to meet your exact needs in determining which users are in which set. Also you should know that the current reporting tools are designed mostly with a single rule set in mind, so getting reports for many different rulesets may be a bit clunky right now, but you can do it.

What are the server requirements?

Any standard Linux, FreeBSD, Unix, or other any POSIX operating system. with the Apache web server. Throttlebox currently works with all available versions of Apache, 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2. We run Fedora Core on our desktops here and on our servers we use Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Any reasonably modern CPU and memory that you might use for a web site will be fine. Like any Linux software, in extreme conditions the more memory you have the faster everything will run. The admin interface can be accessed from most any operating system with web access including Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Microsoft Windows, etc. Like most server software, Strongbox is not designed for a _server_ running the Windows desktop system.

How is CPU and memory loading for the throttling process?

It's too low to measure with a reasonable level of traffic. We ran it at 12,000 hits per second, or about 8,300,000 GB per month to load down a 2GHz processor. To get to 8,300,000 GB you'd need to have perhaps a million members, so as long as you have fewer than 50,000 members you probably won't be able to detect any CPU load. Memory usage for Throttlebox can be calculated as follows:

Number of simultaneous users online =~ members / 100

Memory use = (simultaneous users X 2KB) + 4 MB

So for example with 10,000 users Throttlebox would use roughly 4.2MB of memory. This depends on your system, though. 64 bit executables are bigger than 32 bit ones, so if you have a 64 bit processor everything on the system will take more memory. There are other variables as well, but the bottom line is that again unless you have hundreds of thousands of users Throttlebox isn't going to take any significant amount of memory. Also there will be a bit of memory used when an event is running such as someone running a report, but due to the way Linux shares code memory it won't be more than a few MBs at most.

Can I see how much total bandwidth a particular user has used over a period of time?

Yes, you can look at the last 24 hours, broken down by hour, the last 7 days, broken into 4 hour segments, or the last 30 days, broken into 24 hour segments. Along with total bandwidth you can see video bandwidth, image bandwidth, ZIP file bandwidth, or whatever other rules you choose to create. See:
http://bettercgi.com/throttlebox/images/userReport.png

and

http://bettercgi.com/throttlebox/images/videoReport.png

Can it be used on a domain that is just serving galleries (free access) to set a daily cutoff limit - ie after the server has served 10GB (or whatever), it will now refuse any further connections?

There is certainly the potential to set up something like that. Throttlebox is new, so while things like rulesets and controlling free galleries have been included in the basic system, they haven't been completely fleshed out just yet. The admin and reporting tools currently are designed mostly for regular pay sites with a single rule set, for example. The advantage to you is that they can be fleshed out with your particular needs and desires in mind, so you get exactly what you want rather than getting whatever we already designed. On the other hand, there may be additional fees for some of these enhancements and customizations. A simple way of doing a free site would be to use a free log in system where they just enter their email address and they are sent a user name and password for free. Each email address is only sent one user name, so the limits can be enforced per user name just as they would be on any pay site. Another option would be to use the IP address instead of the user name. Limiting downloads per IP seems like the obvious choice, but as you know an IP and a user are not the same thing. A single user may have many IPs and a single proxy IP may have several users, so such a system would need the limits set high enough to allow for that. Of course the great thing about that is that we already have a list of the proxies like AOL's that need to be treated specially, because we use that for Strongbox. Anyway this is something I'll be putting more thought into over the next few weeks and we'll nail down the best way to do it, but the basic functionallity of Throttlebox certainly allows for that.

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