[Firehol-support] bursting by IP

[Tommy Butler]

I'd like to allow traffic for a given class to burst up to a higher rate,
but only within a sane timeframe, and /probably/ based on remote IP.

The reason is because I'd like someone to be able to hit my web pages and
get content displayed quickly without allowing a constant, sustained amount
of high throughput to that destination IP.  In cases where sustained
unlimited throughput takes place, my hosting provider sends me a monthly
bill that is $200 higher than normal.  *Surprise*

The easiest solution was to take my monthly outgoing allotment of 250GB and
divide it by 30, and see how much bandwidth I had per day, then convert it
to kbits, and convert that down to seconds.  At this point I know I have X
amount of kbits to allow per second all month long...

...but that is sub-optimal.  I don't have a constant influx of traffic all
month long.  It's spikey--I get a few hundred unique visits per day,
sometimes more, if only looking at legitimate traffic.  During this time,
it would be fine to let those visitors see pages at full speed.  But it
would NOT be fine to let visitor(s) continuously pull the maximum amount of
bandwidth possible for a sustained period of time.

So I'm kind of half-way to a solution.  I'm shaping my traffic (yay!)
 Everything is under control and I know I won't get any more surprise
bills--call them the "overdraft fees" of the web hosting industry.  But
there is more to be desired: I'd like to allow legitimate visitors (if
there is any way to classify that kind of traffic at all), to view pages at
maximum throughput while still keeping an eye on my usage so that there
aren't overages.  Bursting seems like a way to do this, but I'm not clear
on just how to make it work.

Any feedback is appreciated =)

Thanks!