Bandwidth throttling

File Director can support customers in scenarios where network speed or quality may result in a lower quality of service for users. Bandwidth Throttling routinely and passively measures the available upload bandwidth between the File Director Windows client and map point storage. No additional bandwidth is consumed as a result of these measurements.

File Director administrators can apply settings for Windows clients to consume a percentage of the total bandwidth available. The following settings can be defined in HKLM/Software/AppSense/DataNow for all appropriate endpoints.

These keys only affect uploads.

Values Description
Value Name: AutoThrottlePercentage

Value Type: REG_DWORD

Value Data: Decimal Value 0 to 100

Default Value: 100

The percentage of the estimated pipe that File Director is permitted to use:
  • 100 – Turns off throttling
  • 1-99 – The percentage of available estimated upload bandwidth is used
  • Value not present – 100 percent of estimated available bandwidth is used

This setting is only available for HKLM.

Value Name: AutoThrottleMinimumKBps

Value Type: REG_DWORD

Value Data: Decimal Value (in Kilobytes)

Default Value: 30

The minimum limit in Kilobytes below which the File Director connection is not throttled.

File Director runs a passive test on its own upload speed, and once it's collected enough data will throttle its connection to use a percentage of that upload pipe. This setting applies a minimum working connection speed beyond which, File Director will not throttle.

In certain network conditions the test may not be reliable. For example, uploading very large numbers of tiny files can skew the result causing underestimation of available bandwidth or where there is an excellent connection to the network but very poor connection to the DN server. This can cause us to falsely underestimate the size of the upload pipe.

This setting is only available for HKLM.

Value Name: AutoThrottleRetestInterval

Value Type: REG_DWORD

Value Data: Decimal Value (interval in ms)

Default Value: 3600000

How often File Director retests the amount of available bandwidth. Enter a value in milliseconds. Performing this test briefly removes the throttle. If a value is not present a period of 1 hour (3600000ms) is applied.

File Director needs to perform this retest as network conditions may change on the end point. For example, the user may be roaming across different wireless networks and a throttle value which seemed appropriate at a particular time of the day may be inappropriate at another.

This setting is only available for HKLM.

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