Charly's Column – Mod_bw for Apache

Fighting the Heavyweights

Article from Issue 162/2014
Author(s):

A powerful web server will not help you much if too many users are competing for the bandwidth of its network connection. Sys admin columnist Charly came to a decision: The big data hogs get less favorable spots at his watering hole in future.

I have a web server with a 100Mbps connection that runs dozens of virtual hosts. One of them provides ISO images of Linux distributions, some of which are several gigabytes in size. If enough people try to grab them at the same time, the pipes get blocked  – downloads push the remaining HTTP traffic off the road, Apache response times skyrocket, and users are annoyed.

My solution here goes by the name of libapache2-mod-bw [1], or similar, depending on your distribution. With this module, I can control the use of bandwidth (bw). Figure 1 shows an example with an excerpt from an Apache configuration that demonstrates the module's abilities.

Figure 1: Apache sample configuration with mod_bw directives.

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