(This article is part of a series starting with Back to Basics - What is a Traffic Manager, Anyway?)
Bandwidth is a limited resource for many websites, and in this article, we’ll investigate how you can use Traffic Manager to make the most of that resource, by controlling the level of service that different users get as they access your website.
On your web site, you might have a range of content, including some large images or file downloads. If too many people hit those links at the same time, that will use a large amount of bandwidth and starve other users so they get a poor level of service from the site. In this screenshot, you can see one user downloading the content, and you can see that you can get up to 4 megabits throughput on our simple test system (my laptop)
If another user comes along, they’re going to struggle to get a good performance from the website. However, with Traffic Manager, we can set up a rule that throttles users if they are not logged into the website. So in this second screenshot, without being logged in, you can see that the bandwidth is capped at a lower level. This rule applies a bandwidth limit of one megabits a second to users who are not logged in.
We can change the setting whenever we like; we can upgrade users to ten megabits a second, and that would be reflected almost immediately in the download speeds they receive.
This particular TrafficScript rule is very straightforward. It simply looks to see if the user has a cookie. If a user doesn't have that login cookie, then we apply the bandwidth limiting class. The bandwidth class can apply to individual connections. It can be shared by all the connections that use that class, you can even share it across the traffic managers if you're running a large cluster.
Try it for yourself – and see how easy it is to have great website performance with limited bandwidth.
This article is part of a series:
1. Back to Basics - What is a Traffic Manager, Anyway?
2. Three ways to use Traffic Manager
3. How to set up Load Balancing with Traffic Manager
4. Health Monitoring with Traffic Manager
5. Controlling Service Levels with Traffic Manager
6. Fixing Errors on a Web Site with Traffic Manager
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