How Bandwidth is allocated at between Red Leaders at a normal Site and between Clients at a Well Connected Site

Applies to
StifleR

Information
StifleR can automatically pause or re-prioritize content transfer while also dynamically limiting or increasing the amount of Bandwidth used between your content servers and client systems at any Location.

Bandwidth limits are set at the site level. A Site may include one or many subnets linked together as a single management unit. So how is the Site Bandwidth divided for use between clients and subnets?

The answer is quite simple and demonstrates the granular control that StifleR allows you over your network. There is a difference in the allocation between a normal site and a WellConneted site so both are covered in this article.

Normal Site

At a normal site the Bandwidth is allocated for use by Red Leaders, the single client on each subnet that is responsible for downloading content across the WAN.

Let us assume that for a particular site the Maximum bandwidth that has been set for that site is 10Mb/s. StifleR is aware that for this particular site there are five subnets grouped together for administrative purposes. StifleR also knows how many of these subnets are actively downloading content at any time and can apportion bandwidth accordingly. So if only one Subnet is actively downloading at a particular time, StifleR will allocate the full 10Mb/s to the active Red Leader on that subnet. A few minutes later three more of the subnets start to download content. Immediately the StifleR Server will allocate a quarter of the site bandwidth to each of the Active Red Leaders which will now use a maximum of 2.5 Mb/s each. As soon a one of these subnets becomes inactive the available Bandwidth is reallocated so that each active Red Leader is using as much Bandwidth as possible at any time.

WellConnected Site

To quote from the StifleR Planning and Deployment Guide –

At a Well Connected Site:

“A Red Leader will still be selected, but the bandwidth allocated to 'Non-Red Leaders' is the same. This allows for faster P2P transfers and faster deployments in general.”

Woah there; Sounds like the Wild West! Fear not, the Sheriff is in town.

The Server is aware of what every single client is doing at any particular time which means that the logic that is applied to bandwidth allocation between Red Leaders at the Site level can be applied at the individual client level. The StifleR Server is aware of how many clients are actively downloading at any particular time and the WellConnected bandwidth can be divided accordingly. So if the Well Connected Site has a maximum bandwidth setting of 50Mb/s and there are five clients actively downloading at a particular time then each will be configured to use a maximum of 10Mb/s.

There are some caveats around this WellConnected behaviour which you should consider as part of your StifleR planning and implementation. If the link is busy then there is the possibility that the download job will compete with other traffic. The ideal way to get around this issue is to use LEDBAT to help control things. There are current improvements in development around how we can control these data streams and we are working on getting a better story out around configuration options to minimize the possibility of disruption.