RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
My Internet bandwidth usage skyrocketed ridiculously this month, and I wanted to know why. I suspected Amazon Prime, but I wasn't sure. So I decided to install OpenWrt on a spare router to uncover (and throttle, if need be) the offender(s).
I'm comfortable with SSH and the Linux shell, but far from an expert in OpenWrt, so I figured I'd install it with LuCI to make my life easier. But in the course of poking around the Interwebs, I came across Gargoyle -- a rather limited GUI front end for OpenWrt that has a specific focus on bandwidth monitoring and control.
I must say, I'm rather impressed.
Gargoyle can only access a small fraction of OpenWrt's capabilities, almost all having to do with bandwidth control. It also provides interfaces for port forwarding, whitelisting, or blacklisting, but that's about it. (The other features of OpenWrt can be accessed via SSH, if needed, by enabling SSH in Gargoyle.)
Despite the Gargoyle GUI's very limited set of capabilities, it does what it's supposed to do -- help track and control bandwidth use -- very nicely. There are numerous graphs, tables, charts, and text displays that allow historic or real-time monitoring of bandwidth use and Web activity, as well as simple, intuitive interfaces to throttle, limit, shape, and otherwise control bandwidth use by device IP, MAC address, port(s), or hostname.
In my case, I was right about Prime Video. It uses an absurd amount of bandwidth, especially considering that I only have a 32" 720p television. It was using between 7000 and 9000 kbps. And unlike Netflix, Amazon doesn't provide any way to adjust the quality to tame the usage.
After some trial and error, I found that throttling the Roku box to 2750kbps and 20 percent of available bandwidth was the sweet spot. It provided satisfactory (for me) picture quality, with no pixelization or buffering pauses. That setting also worked well when using Netflix and any other video service I tried.
I also discovered that my turtle tank webcam was using crazy bandwidth. Apparently FFmpeg was completely ignoring the quality settings and using whatever upstream throughput was available. Gargoyle effectively tamed that, too.
It was also interesting to look at the logs and see how my various devices like to phone home for updates and the like in the middle of the night. Nothing there was especially surprising, but it was still interesting. It's like when I go to bed, they go out for strolls on the Internet.
I wouldn't recommend Gargoyle for anyone who needs fine control over anything except bandwidth unless you're also comfortable using OpenWrt over SSH for the rest of what you need. Gargoyle's capabilities are pretty limited. But if what you care about is finding and taming bandwidth hogs, it's a very nice, very useful front end.
Rich
I'm comfortable with SSH and the Linux shell, but far from an expert in OpenWrt, so I figured I'd install it with LuCI to make my life easier. But in the course of poking around the Interwebs, I came across Gargoyle -- a rather limited GUI front end for OpenWrt that has a specific focus on bandwidth monitoring and control.
I must say, I'm rather impressed.
Gargoyle can only access a small fraction of OpenWrt's capabilities, almost all having to do with bandwidth control. It also provides interfaces for port forwarding, whitelisting, or blacklisting, but that's about it. (The other features of OpenWrt can be accessed via SSH, if needed, by enabling SSH in Gargoyle.)
Despite the Gargoyle GUI's very limited set of capabilities, it does what it's supposed to do -- help track and control bandwidth use -- very nicely. There are numerous graphs, tables, charts, and text displays that allow historic or real-time monitoring of bandwidth use and Web activity, as well as simple, intuitive interfaces to throttle, limit, shape, and otherwise control bandwidth use by device IP, MAC address, port(s), or hostname.
In my case, I was right about Prime Video. It uses an absurd amount of bandwidth, especially considering that I only have a 32" 720p television. It was using between 7000 and 9000 kbps. And unlike Netflix, Amazon doesn't provide any way to adjust the quality to tame the usage.
After some trial and error, I found that throttling the Roku box to 2750kbps and 20 percent of available bandwidth was the sweet spot. It provided satisfactory (for me) picture quality, with no pixelization or buffering pauses. That setting also worked well when using Netflix and any other video service I tried.
I also discovered that my turtle tank webcam was using crazy bandwidth. Apparently FFmpeg was completely ignoring the quality settings and using whatever upstream throughput was available. Gargoyle effectively tamed that, too.
It was also interesting to look at the logs and see how my various devices like to phone home for updates and the like in the middle of the night. Nothing there was especially surprising, but it was still interesting. It's like when I go to bed, they go out for strolls on the Internet.
I wouldn't recommend Gargoyle for anyone who needs fine control over anything except bandwidth unless you're also comfortable using OpenWrt over SSH for the rest of what you need. Gargoyle's capabilities are pretty limited. But if what you care about is finding and taming bandwidth hogs, it's a very nice, very useful front end.
Rich
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