tc-tbf(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ALGORITHM | PARAMETERS | EXAMPLE & USAGE | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON

TC(8)                             Linux                            TC(8)

NAME         top

       tbf - Token Bucket Filter

SYNOPSIS         top

       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         top

       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, sending 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 configured 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         top

       As the name implies, traffic is filtered based on the expenditure
       of tokens.  Tokens roughly correspond to bytes, with the
       additional constraint 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 shaping, only a single packet can get sent per jiffy
       - for HZ=100, this means 100 packets of on average 1000 bytes
       each, which roughly corresponds to 1mbit/s.

PARAMETERS         top

       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 calculation 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         top

       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         top

       tc(8)

AUTHOR         top

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

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the iproute2 (utilities for controlling
       TCP/IP networking and traffic) project.  Information about the
       project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/iproute2⟩.
       If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       netdev@vger.kernel.org, shemminger@osdl.org.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2.git⟩ on
       2023-12-22.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2023-12-20.)  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

iproute2                    13 December 2001                       TC(8)

Pages that refer to this page: tc(8)tc-htb(8)tc-prio(8)