TC(8)                                                                  Linux                                                                 TC(8)

NAME

       tbf - Token Bucket Filter

SYNOPSIS

       tc qdisc ... tbf rate rate burst bytes/cell ( latency ms | limit bytes ) [ mpu bytes [ peakrate rate mtu bytes/cell ] ]

       burst is also known as buffer and maxburst. mtu is also known as minburst.

DESCRIPTION

       The Token Bucket Filter is a classful queueing discipline available for traffic control with the tc(8) command.

       TBF  is  a  pure  shaper and never schedules traffic. It is non-work-conserving and may throttle itself, although packets are available, to
       ensure that the configured rate is not exceeded.  It is able to shape up to 1mbit/s of normal traffic with ideal minimal burstiness,  send-
       ing out data exactly at the configured rates.

       Much  higher  rates are possible but at the cost of losing the minimal burstiness. In that case, data is on average dequeued at the config-
       ured rate but may be sent much faster at millisecond timescales. Because of further queues living in network adaptors, this is often not  a
       problem.

ALGORITHM

       As  the name implies, traffic is filtered based on the expenditure of tokens.  Tokens roughly correspond to bytes, with the additional con-
       straint that each packet consumes some tokens, no matter how small it is. This reflects the fact that even a zero-sized packet occupies the
       link for some time.

       On  creation,  the  TBF  is  stocked  with tokens which correspond to the amount of traffic that can be burst in one go. Tokens arrive at a
       steady rate, until the bucket is full.

       If no tokens are available, packets are queued, up to a configured limit. The TBF now calculates the token deficit, and throttles until the
       first packet in the queue can be sent.

       If it is not acceptable to burst out packets at maximum speed, a peakrate can be configured to limit the speed at which the bucket empties.
       This peakrate is implemented as a second TBF with a very small bucket, so that it doesn't burst.

       To achieve perfection, the second bucket may contain only a single packet, which leads to the earlier mentioned 1mbit/s limit.

       This limit is caused by the fact that the kernel can only throttle for at minimum 1 'jiffy', which depends on HZ as 1/HZ. For perfect shap-
       ing,  only  a single packet can get sent per jiffy - for HZ=100, this means 100 packets of on average 1000 bytes each, which roughly corre-
       sponds to 1mbit/s.

PARAMETERS

       See tc(8) for how to specify the units of these values.

       limit or latency
              Limit is the number of bytes that can be queued waiting for tokens to become available. You can also  specify  this  the  other  way
              around by setting the latency parameter, which specifies the maximum amount of time a packet can sit in the TBF. The latter calcula-
              tion takes into account the size of the bucket, the rate and possibly the peakrate (if  set).  These  two  parameters  are  mutually
              exclusive.

       burst  Also  known  as  buffer or maxburst.  Size of the bucket, in bytes. This is the maximum amount of bytes that tokens can be available
              for instantaneously.  In general, larger shaping rates require a larger buffer. For 10mbit/s on Intel, you  need  at  least  10kbyte
              buffer if you want to reach your configured rate!

              If  your buffer is too small, packets may be dropped because more tokens arrive per timer tick than fit in your bucket.  The minimum
              buffer size can be calculated by dividing the rate by HZ.

              Token usage calculations are performed using a table which by default has a resolution of 8 packets.  This resolution can be changed
              by  specifying  the  cell  size  with the burst. For example, to specify a 6000 byte buffer with a 16 byte cell size, set a burst of
              6000/16. You will probably never have to set this. Must be an integral power of 2.

       mpu    A zero-sized packet does not use zero bandwidth. For ethernet, no packet uses less than 64 bytes. The Minimum Packet Unit determines
              the minimal token usage (specified in bytes) for a packet. Defaults to zero.

       rate   The speed knob. See remarks above about limits! See tc(8) for units.

       Furthermore, if a peakrate is desired, the following parameters are available:

       peakrate
              Maximum  depletion  rate  of the bucket. The peakrate does not need to be set, it is only necessary if perfect millisecond timescale
              shaping is required.

       mtu/minburst
              Specifies the size of the peakrate bucket. For perfect accuracy, should be set to the MTU  of  the  interface.   If  a  peakrate  is
              needed,  but  some  burstiness is acceptable, this size can be raised. A 3000 byte minburst allows around 3mbit/s of peakrate, given
              1000 byte packets.

              Like the regular burstsize you can also specify a cell size.

EXAMPLE &; USAGE
       To attach a TBF with a sustained maximum rate of 0.5mbit/s, a peakrate of 1.0mbit/s, a 5kilobyte buffer, with a pre-bucket queue size limit
       calculated so the TBF causes at most 70ms of latency, with perfect peakrate behaviour, issue:

       # tc qdisc add dev eth0 handle 10: root tbf rate 0.5mbit 
         burst 5kb latency 70ms peakrate 1mbit       
         minburst 1540

       To attach an inner qdisc, for example sfq, issue:

       # tc qdisc add dev eth0 parent 10:1 handle 100: sfq

       Without inner qdisc TBF queue acts as bfifo. If the inner qdisc is changed the limit/latency is not effective anymore.

SEE ALSO

       tc(8)

AUTHOR

       Alexey N. Kuznetsov, <kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru>. This manpage maintained by bert hubert <ahu@ds9a.nl>

iproute2                                                         13 December 2001                                                            TC(8)