Traffic Shaping with Lighttpd + PHP

Here's how I manage traffic on my web site that's served over a basic cable connection. The site has a forum and an area for register members to download stuff from. Having a very limited upload capacity I have to make sure members don't suck everything and make the forum unresponsive.

So here's how my lighttpd.conf file is setup:

# this limits the amount of connection a user can make to the server

evasive.max-conns-per-ip = 10

# then on my site configuration I use a combination of connection.kbytes-per-secon and evasive.max-conns-per-ip to throttle user connections to the download script

$HTTP["host"] =~ "sitegeisha\.dyndns\.dk" {

connection.kbytes-per-second = 64

$HTTP["url"] =~ "dl\.php" {

connection.kbytes-per-second = 32

evasive.max-conns-per-ip = 3

}

}

This configuration allows me to limit the number of simultaneous downloads they can make, if they go over 3 they get a 403 error message.