SABnzbd Forums

I'm not sure if this would be practical to implement, but it would be amazing if SABnzbd+ could somehow measure the total available bandwidth every 15 minutes or so, and dynamically limit the download speed to be about 70% or whatever of what was available, so that other users on a network could do simple tasks like browse the web without any problems.

The big issue I've been having with SABnzbd+ automatically downloading stuff 24/7 is that I keep running up against Time Warner's packet shaping.  Basically, from about 1am to 9am, and then 10am to 6pm, my speed is about 1.8MB/sec give or take.  But during peak hours, Time Warner heavily throttles the traffic at varying speeds, ranging from about 250KB/sec to about 800KB/sec.  The unpredictability of the throttling has made it really difficult to schedule a system of download speed caps that will grab stuff as fast as possible while still leaving bandwidth for other users.  The available bandwidth always seems to dip just below whatever I've set, and then I get my roommate complaining that he can't do anything online (he keeps sneaking in my room and pulling the ethernet cable out of my server).

I know I can just set the speed cap to a really low number, but this seems like a waste and it basically means I'd have to wait until the next day to watch anything.

On most routers you can do traffic shaping yourself.
E.g. you can give nntp traffic low priority.
Other than that there's a great program called NetLimiter (not free),
which does all sorts or traffic shaping on the PC it runs on.

This problem is too complicated to solve in SABnzbd,
we prefer to spend our time on other features.

Thank you very much for the response.  I posted this mostly because I looked into it a little and my router, which I just bought, doesn't really have any traffic shaping features (which is definitely something I should have looked into before buying).  It looks like there are a number of free traffic shaping tools I can install on the Linux box that's running SABnzbd+ to correct the problem, so thanks for pointing me in the right direction.