Bandwidth Control

When building digital appliances with a Raspberry Pi, it's often important to limit the bandwidth the device continues. Applications that involve streaming or public use, like a Nextcloud file server, IPFS node, or Bittorrent server can use significant amounts of bandwidth, unless they are specifically restricted.

Bandwidth control can be accomplished by Wondershaper.

Install:

These commands will download and install the latest copy of Wondershaper:

git clone https://github.com/magnific0/wondershaper
cd wondershaper
sudo make install

Usage

On the RPi, the wireless connection is identified as wlan0, and you can see it by running the command ifconfig.

My home internet connection is 25 megabit download and 1-2 megabit upload. So upload is much slower than download. Therefore, limiting the upload bandwidth for each device. I generally like to set an RPi for 512 kbps (kilobit per second) down and 128 kbps up.

Configuration

  • Use the nano text editor to edit the configuration file for Wondershaper:

    • sudo nano /etc/conf.d/wondershaper.conf
  • Here is the configuration settings I prefer to use, as described above:
[wondershaper]
# Adapter
#
IFACE="wlan0"

# Download rate in Kbps
#
DSPEED="512"

# Upload rate in Kbps
#
USPEED="128"
  • Hit Ctrl-x to exit, and then y to save the changes.

Start Wondershaper

  • Once the config file has been updated, you can start Wondershaper:

    • sudo systemctl start wondershaper

  • Then you can double check that it started correctly with:

    • sudo systemctl status wondershaper

  • Finally, configure Wondershaper to start on boot:

    • sudo systemctl enable wondershaper