Network Traffic Balancer

Martin — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:23:47 +0000

Maximizing the download rate of an Internet connection might be a good way to download a file the fastest way but it can put a strain on all other network and Internet activities in that time. A user wanting to play an online game while downloading with full speed will notice high ping rates which is not desirable. It can also lead to disconnects or temporary load errors in general.

One way of dealing with this situation is to run a traffic balancer to ensure that the other activities are not affected by the downloads or uploads.

Netbalancer (via To The PC) is not limiting the bandwidth of the applications directly. It is instead changing the network priority of applications to control the Internet traffic. The network priority of a software that is demanding lots of bandwidth would be reduced by Netbalancer to ensure that other applications with a higher priority get their share of the bandwidth.

By default all network priorities are set to normal and it is up to the user to modify them. This usually means that applications like P2P clients, ftp clients or others that download and upload files continuously are reduced from normal to low. It could also mean to raise the network priority of an application to high to prioritize it.

The main interface looks similar to a process viewer. It displays all running processes of the computer system, their priority, incoming and outgoing traffic, the number of connections and additional information.

A right-click on any row will bring up a menu with options to change the network priority of a process or to allow or block its Internet traffic completely. There is also a handy button in the toolbar for all of these options plus the ability to block all network traffic.

A severity level can be configured in the options. The speed difference between low, normal and high priority can be set. Netbalancer might be the right application for users who regularly download or upload data while working with other applications that need bandwidth as well.

Tags: bandwidth, internet, internet traffic, netbalancer, network priority, network traffic, Network Traffic Balancer, traffic balancer

Microsoft Network Monitor

Martin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:15:00 +0000

Microsoft Network Monitor is a network protocol analyzer that captures network traffic, displays it in it’s program interface and provides access to functions that allow to analyze the traffic. The application provides access to all available network adapters which can be selected individually. The tabs driven interface creates a new tab for every capture process which is listing all applications and processes that have caused traffic on the network adapter.

The actual capturing process does not start before the user clicks on the Start button of the application. Another possibility would be to load a previously saved session which can be displayed as well in the interface. The network traffic will be captured continuously until the user decides to stop the capturing process.

Filters can be used to narrow down the results. About 25 default filters are available like filtering by IPv4 addresses but the user can also define his own filters. Each frame is displayed listing the process name, source and destination IP, protocol name and description. Another pane is displaying details about the currently selected frame.

The network monitor runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 and is available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the selected operating systems.

Tags: capture traffic, microsoft network monitor, network analyzer, network monitor, network traffic, packet capture, protocol analyzer

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Network Traffic Balancer

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