virtualbox.org

Hello,

I read the documentation and noticed the note that says:

VirtualBox shapes VM traffic only in the transmit direction, delaying the packets being sent by virtual machines. It does not limit the traffic being received by virtual machines.

1. I wonder what that is?
2. Is there any way around this?

I want to use my VM to backup an online shared hosting account and I don't want the VM to utilize the incoming bandwidth so much that it hurts my current bandwidth uses.

Thanks in advance

There's no way to limit "incoming bandwidth" that I can think of. The data arrives when it arrives. Even if VBox discards good incoming packets the bandwidth has already been used. There might be solutions for particular protocols, but not a general one.

That makes so much sense that I don't know why I didn't think of that myself thanks!

Well, to play devil's advocate, there are applications that limit their incoming (download) rate. I'm using two of them as we speak. JDownloader is one of them. I don't know how they do it (adding a time delay between acknowledgment of packets arrived?), but they definitely do it...

But I don't need a download manager .. I need to limit the b/w on the NIC ... but that's OK I'll either find a solution built into rsync or just not limit the d/l and find a schedule that'll work for the backup ... no harm done.

Thanks for the idea though

socratis wrote:Well, to play devil's advocate, there are applications that limit their incoming (download) rate. I'm using two of them as we speak. JDownloader is one of them. I don't know how they do it (adding a time delay between acknowledgment of packets arrived?), but they definitely do it...

That's a sender side delay (you are delaying the sending of an ack or new request) - exactly the same as what VBox already does, and not what the OP asked about.

Anyway, as I said above - I'm sure there may be solutions for individual protocols, but I don't see a general solution to limit the volume of TCP/IP data.