Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Limit Download Speed with Apache

By  on  

My adventures into retro gaming have brought me back into the semi-seedy world of piracy websites and the technology considerations that dictate their business model.  Annoying popups and pornographic advertisements aside, the most obvious technological observation I made was that each of these sites used bandwidth throttling as a way to make money.  Want that game to download quickly?  Stump up $10 per month and it will be lightning fast; otherwise you're relegated to sleep-inducing download speeds.

In researching download speed limits, it became apparent that dynamic rate limitation is incredibly inefficient, and that the best way to throttle downloads is by configuring different servers or virtual directories with different download speeds, and directing each user to each server based on the download speed they should have.

Configuring Apache's Download Speed Limit

To throttle the download speed on Apache servers, enable the mod_ratelimit extension:

<!-- Requires 2.4+ -->
LoadModule ratelimit_module modules/mod_ratelimit.so

Then set different download speeds by directory with the following Apache configuration:

<IfModule mod_ratelimit.c>
    <!-- 100kb/second limit -->
    <Location /tier1>
        SetOutputFilter RATE_LIMIT
        SetEnv rate-limit 100
    </Location>

    <!-- 500kb/second limit -->
    <Location /tier2>
        SetOutputFilter RATE_LIMIT
        SetEnv rate-limit 500
    </Location>
</IfModule>

Some type of dynamic Apache config would allow custom URLs per user which would obscure download speed URLs so users couldn't dynamically spoof URLs to get some else's download speed.

The download speed limit and throttling business seems booming: just look at MEGA and other likewise services.  The science behind download throttling is big business and I hope to learn more about it.  In the mean time, it's nice to know that download speed limitation can be done with a few Apache directives!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    PHP / MooTools 1.2 Accordion Helper

    The MooTools Accordion plugin seems to be the plugin that people seem to have the most problems with. It's an awesome plugin, so I can see why so many people want to use it, but I think that may be part of the problem.

  • By
    Check All/None Checkboxes Using MooTools

    There's nothing worse than having to click every checkbox in a list. Why not allow users to click one item and every checkbox becomes checked? Here's how to do just that with MooTools 1.2. The XHTML Note the image with the ucuc ID -- that...

Discussion

  1. Amanulllah Khan

    is it possible to limit only download thread for download managers?? like In internet download manager there is setting up to 32 threads.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!