network traffic control

[David Thistlethwaite]

Before the proxmox backup server team added support for network traffic control, I used a program called wondershaper.
So when the new traffic control feature became available I immediately tried to switch.
I have had no luck, I still had wondershaper installed but had the service disabled.
Does anyone know is the wondershaper system interferes with the proxmox traffic control feature, as perhaps I need to uninstall wondershaper before I can get traffic control to work.

Thanks for any input

David

 

[dcsapak]

no, the traffic control feature works solely inside the pbs daemon processes, the system network is not touched
(i don't know wondershaper, but my guess is that it controls the network adapters/interfaces directly, so that should both work)

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

no, the traffic control feature works solely inside the pbs daemon processes, the system network is not touched
(i don't know wondershaper, but my guess is that it controls the network adapters/interfaces directly, so that should both work)

ok, that being said I completely disabled wondershaper and could not get PBS traffic control to affect proxmox-backup-client backups of an NFS based volumes. Ideas ?

 

[dcsapak]

ok, that being said I completely disabled wondershaper and could not get PBS traffic control to affect proxmox-backup-client backups of an NFS based volumes. Ideas ?

what exactly do you mean? how did you setup the traffic control and what did you observe?

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

what exactly do you mean? how did you setup the traffic control and what did you observe?

I added traffic control as per the normal gui, had it restrict traffic on the 192.168.10.0/24 subnet, (vmbr0 interface), then ran proxmox-backup-client backups of an NFS based volumes. and observed that the proxmox network monitor and iftop -i vmbr0 results were completely unrestricted traffic, I have set the pbs traffic control 20 20MB/s and the observed throughput was in excess of 450Mb/s (56MB/s) with three of these backups running.

Thanks

 

[dcsapak]

where did you ran the proxmox-backup-client? on the same machine? or on a different machine in the 192.168.20.0/24 subnet? how does the nfs come into play? (is it the datastore or the source ?)
also as i said only the pbs api is traffic controlled, so the vmbr may have other traffic (e.g. from the nfs maybe?) that is not accounted there

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

The pbs machine is the where the proxmox-backup-client,(it should use the pbs api), process runs with local disk as backup storage, it backs up data from NFS based data set(s), all of the traffic flowing through the vmbr0 interface on the pbs server. There is no other network traffic of any kind on the pbs server so its only the backups.

 

[dcsapak]

ok then this makes sense, as the traffic from the nfs to the proxmox-backup-client is counted for vmbr0 but the traffic control does not handle that

EDIT: also when you connect to 'localhost' you should throttle the connections from 127.0.0.1 instead of the subnet?

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

ok then this makes sense, as the traffic from the nfs to the proxmox-backup-client is counted for vmbr0 but the traffic control does not handle that

EDIT: also when you connect to 'localhost' you should throttle the connections from 127.0.0.1 instead of the subnet?

ok, I am not following these statements, can you please elaborate ?
Thanks

 

[dcsapak]

i'll try:

the pbs traffic control only works on the pbs api (so on port 8007 of the pbs server) since the code is inside there (not as an extra daemon/process) and it does not touch the os networking at all
so if the proxmox-backup-client is on the same machine and needs to read the data from an nfs, the traffic from the nfs to the server is not throttled because it's outside of the traffic control scope

also, depending on how you use the proxmox-backup-client, the ip the server sees is 127.0.0.1 (when connecting from the same machine)

this should be true if i did not misunderstand you about your setup

does it make it clearer?

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

i'll try:

the pbs traffic control only works on the pbs api (so on port 8007 of the pbs server) since the code is inside there (not as an extra daemon/process) and it does not touch the os networking at all
so if the proxmox-backup-client is on the same machine and needs to read the data from an nfs, the traffic from the nfs to the server is not throttled because it's outside of the traffic control scope

also, depending on how you use the proxmox-backup-client, the ip the server sees is 127.0.0.1 (when connecting from the same machine)

this should be true if i did not misunderstand you about your setup

does it make it clearer?

Yes this clears things up
The proxmox-backup-client does not use the pbs api so it cannot be 'traffic controlled'

The proxmox-backup-client accesses an NFS export from another server using the autofs subsystem so it may be seeing the remote NFS filesystem as a locally mounted FS at /mnt/mount1 .....

Does this sound like I have it correct now ?

Thanks

 

[dcsapak]

The proxmox-backup-client does not use the pbs api so it cannot be 'traffic controlled'

it uses the api but only for the backup upload, a diagram would look like this

               ┌───────────────────┐
               │                   │
               │   Backup Server   │
               │         ▲         │
               │         │         │
               │         ├─────────┼─────── Only this part is traffic controlled
               │         │         │
┌─────────┐    │  ┌──────┴─────┐   │
│   NFS   ├────┼──►   Client   │   │
└─────────┘    │  └────────────┘   │
               │                   │
               └───────────────────┘

the data flows from the nfs (via a mount) to the pbs client which sends it via the api to the server (which is traffic controlled)

but since the client is sitting on the server, the nfs -> client traffic is counted there on the vmbr

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

it uses the api but only for the backup upload, a diagram would look like this

               ┌───────────────────┐
               │                   │
               │   Backup Server   │
               │         ▲         │
               │         │         │
               │         ├─────────┼─────── Only this part is traffic controlled
               │         │         │
┌─────────┐    │  ┌──────┴─────┐   │
│   NFS   ├────┼──►   Client   │   │
└─────────┘    │  └────────────┘   │
               │                   │
               └───────────────────┘

the data flows from the nfs (via a mount) to the pbs client which sends it via the api to the server (which is traffic controlled)

but since the client is sitting on the server, the nfs -> client traffic is counted there on the vmbr

so if I am understanding correctly, if I have traffic control restrict traffic on 127.0.0.1 then this will control all pbs traffic regardless of subnet source, giving the pbs system control of network bandwidth ?

 

[David Thistlethwaite]

it uses the api but only for the backup upload, a diagram would look like this

               ┌───────────────────┐
               │                   │
               │   Backup Server   │
               │         ▲         │
               │         │         │
               │         ├─────────┼─────── Only this part is traffic controlled
               │         │         │
┌─────────┐    │  ┌──────┴─────┐   │
│   NFS   ├────┼──►   Client   │   │
└─────────┘    │  └────────────┘   │
               │                   │
               └───────────────────┘

the data flows from the nfs (via a mount) to the pbs client which sends it via the api to the server (which is traffic controlled)

but since the client is sitting on the server, the nfs -> client traffic is counted there on the vmbr

Question, if this diagram is accurate then why/how does traffic control work on different subnets ?

Thanks

 

[dcsapak]

this diagram assumes that the pbs client is run on the server as you wrote:

The pbs machine is the where the proxmox-backup-client

if the pbs client is run on another machine then just imagine the box of the client sitting elsewhere. still only the connection from pbs client to the server is traffic controlled