Say I am doing a huge download of a movie or group of tv series episodes from Amazon or Netflix. Is there any practical way of ‘lowering the priority’ of this so that everything else, especially, for example web browsing manually initiated takes priority?
I fully realise that this question is (at least) doubly ill-defined. Firstly you would have to define what counts as ‘background downloads’ somehow, in some terms, and hopefully without the matter becoming a maintenance nightmare. Secondly, would have to decide on what is meant be priority. In QoS terms it is straightforward enough, if only one can apply QoS by either marking or by hackish classification rules or whatever. Without that, it could just mean slowing some things down/throttling/speed shaping or some such, which is not good at all. Air you could try the converse and ‘boost’ things that are considered ‘foreground’ whatever on earth that might mean.
Since it is on an iPad, it would be nice if apps and iOS could manage this as they know how to classify the activity types along the lines that I am trying and failing to express. Failing that it is down to routers. My Firebrick is useless as far as QoS is concerned but very flexible with throttling/speed shaping, even though the end results are a imho inaccurate.
Question though: how on earth could one even hope to formulate rules for matching traffic to define ‘Amazon download’ or ‘Netflix download’?
I don't know if their IPv4 and IPv6 address blocks for such servers could be found somehow, apart from traffic capture and constant whack-a-mole. Also it would be really bad news to limit live streaming because I need all the speed I have got for that.
Anyway, if there is no foreground activity then it is a horrible idea to slow down background downloads.
I am not at all convinced that this issue is either sufficiently well-formed or solvable. However, if anyone has any thoughts then I would welcome them.