The Smoothwall Filter and Firewall has two bandwidth management methods. This article explains what the difference is between them and when you should use each of them.
Web Proxy module - Bandwidth limiting
To manage the traffic going through the Smoothwall Filter, you use the
The settings in the Web proxy - Bandwidth Limiting are used to manage the traffic going through the Guardian web proxy. The tool here allows the web filter to manage bandwidth for different types of web traffic based on the categories in the Smoothwall blocklist or custom categories.
Bandwidth module
The Bandwidth module allows the firewall to manage bandwidth for different types of network traffic based on ports, protocols or application signatures.
Example
When we need to manage bandwidth for Youtube or Facebook traffic, we would use the Web Proxy - Bandwidth limiting.
When we need to manage bandwidth for VPN and/or VoIP traffic, we would use the Bandwidth module. The Bandwidth module can also be used to manage web traffic but only as a whole. If different bandwidth limits are needed for specific web traffic like software updates and Youtube, then the Web proxy - bandwidth Limiter is needed.
Notes
The Web proxy - Bandwidth limiting can work slightly differently than you might expect. The limits configured here are actually for the upload to the clients, not the download from the internet. When a client downloads a file, which is being bandwidth limited by a policy in the Web proxy - Bandwidth limiting section, the download to the proxy may happen at full speed, while the upload of the file to the client will be limited to the values set in the Bandwidth limiting policy.
Most of the time, the download and upload will be the same, but it is possible to see a higher download value temporarily.