Planning Traffic Throttling

Using DSCP values to prioritize traffic allows you to fully utilize your network's bandwidth while providing the best possible performance for your most important traffic. That's the ideal QoS scenario; however, not all network infrastructures support prioritizing traffic using DSCP values. If your network does not support traffic priorities, you can use traffic throttling to ensure that specific applications do not consume more than a specified amount of bandwidth.

Traffic throttling limits traffic on individual computers and cannot limit the aggregate bandwidth used by multiple computers. For example, if you have five Web servers and want to ensure that they never use more than half of your 1,000 Kbps (1 Mbps) link, you must configure the QoS policy to throttle traffic at 100 Kbps for each of the five computers, which will total 500 Kbps if all five servers are sending traffic at their throttled maximum. Do not attempt to use traffic throttling to limit the bandwidth of every application or protocol; instead, use traffic throttling to limit only traffic from low-priority applications, such as network backups or the downloading of large updates. Traffic throttling does not have any network infrastructure requirements.