Bug 227948

Version:            (using KDE 4.3.4)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Debian testing/unstable Packages

Hi Joris,

I'm not sure how useful this would be for others, but my rationale is because I share an alleged-unmetered ADSL network that varies savagely through the day on what it will provide - from 50KB at peak up to 500KB in the early morning - and I always want to have decent performance on interactive applications, while giving as much bandwidth as possible to ktorrent. 

I was thinking of how we could have a setting to use some percentage of the available bandwidth.  Similar to the right-click on the sys-tray icon now, where you can set specific maximum upload and download values.

Being able to select a percentage - or even a 'always leave me x KB of bandwidth' - would mean I could just leave ktorrent running all the time, without impacting on mail & web surfing etc.

I guess that what it would need to do is periodically - every half hour, say - ramp itself up to 'unlimited download' - only for 20 seconds or so - and then it can determine what the maximum bandwidth is at the time.  Then it would throttle itself back to x% of that, or (max-bandwidth minus xKB).  Same on upload, I guess, though that doesn't seem to fluctuate so much on most ADSL connections, and/or people seem less concerned about that side of the pipe.  I guess you'd need settings for a) bandwidth you wanted ktorrent to leave alone, b) periodicity of bandwidth calculation, and c) a trigger in the sys-tray context menu to re-calculate.

I feel that it should probably be done further down the stack - but my experiences with doing QoS on various ADSL routers has never been a happy one, particularly when you try to throttle things like torrent data that are spread across many ports.  I'm sure it's a non-trivial amount of coding, and I notice that no one else has suggested anything like this, so I'm happy if you reckon this is a seriously horrible idea.  :)