Apache Bandwidth Limiting?

IOOOOOI asks: "I work at a high traffic web hosting company and we're trying to find a simple effective way to limit bandwidth hogs, some of whom we've clocked pulling over 4Gb/hr off our servers. We've tried mod_throttle and have looked into QoS/fair queuing as well as a couple of custom solutions in-house. None of these quite did the trick. Has anyone found an effective way to do this, one that can handle individual connection streams?"

altqd

[schmaltz]

try altqd. i've only used it on openbsd, but with it you can selectively throttle bandwidth.

Packeteer

[shave]

Not an Apache based solution, but check out Packeteer Packetshapers [packeteer.com]..specifically the ISP models.. lets you set SLA's by protocol, IP, etc, perform rate limiting, and all other kinds of really cool stuff. Not exactly cheap but extremely effective, and simple to manage.

One solution if you have mod_perl

[merlyn]

The solution that the (defunct) etoys.com adopted for their site was based on code from one of my Perl columns [stonehenge.com]. My code is based on CPU throttling, but you can quickly change it to bytes sent using the same technology.

mod_bandwidth

[Gormless]

I use mod_bandwidth [cohprog.com] at work to simulate 56k connections to the web server.

It works quite well and will throttle per-connection or per-virtualhost.