Take all those TV streaming clients based on P2P technology or software updates for applications like World of Warcraft. They do not offer an option to limit the bandwidth.

Traffic Shaper XP [rediscovered at Raymond.CC] comes to the rescue. Users can restrict the upload and download bandwidth of certain ports and protocols on their systems. That’s right, it is not application based but that is not a huge problem normally unless you randomly select ports in your applications or use applications that do that by themselves.

The easiest way to add an rule in this application is to select one of the connections that are already in place. Just right-click the connection and select Create Matching Rule. Another option is to click on the Add Rules Wizard instead. The user can select the network adapter, if you want to limit the upload or download bandwidth, the protocol (tcp normally), if the rule should be valid for all computers or a specific IP and a port or port range.

The speed limit can be set to various standard values ranging from 0 to unlimited bytes per second. You normally find the port or port range in the options of the application that you use. It would be nice if Traffic Shapper XP would allow to set the upload and download bandwidth for a port in the same rule.

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After that you name the rule and limit the speed to a predefined value between zero and unlimited bytes per seconds. Last but not last you may select a priority and a queue size for that rule. It takes effect immediately after you finished creating it. You might have noticed that you do not specify an executable but only ports in Traffic Shaper XP.

This means that you have to know the ports that the application is using to be able to limit the bandwidth. One possible reason to use this application would be to limit the download speed of an application because you need at least a little bit of bandwidth for your weekly online poker game.

It would be furthermore possible to set the upload limit for ports that are used by bittorrent or emule to 0 effectively eliminating all network traffic from your computer to those networks. I’m not saying your should do this – if no one shares no one is able to download – but it is possible.

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