How to prevent skype from hogging bandwidth?

Question

ADSL (6 Mbps / 768 Kbps )

D-Link DIR-625 Router

Hi Guys,

Whenever one of my family members uses skype video to chat with friends it interferes with other internet tasks... particularly:

• SIP / Asterisk Voip Phone calls (conversations are broken up)
• GoToMeeting screen sharing connections get interrupted
• General downloads

I'd like to adjust my QOS rules to reduce the amount of bandwidth Skype consumes but I'm not sure what port its using for outbound communication. Any ideas? Or perhaps there's a better way to handle this? I don't see any throttling options in the Skype config itself.

Any/all suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

As Randolph Potter commented, you can shape at the router level, or you can use something like netlimiter to shape traffic on the particular machine.

Answer 2

This was one of the posts that I came across while in vain trying to control Skype's bandwidth on Linux.

Finally I got to a way to do that and have explained it here http://www.shantanutushar.com/content/linux-how-stop-skype-eating-all-your-bandwidth http://blog.shantanu.io/2014/01/22/linux-how-to-stop-skype-from-eating-all-your-bandwidth/ (the post has moved). See if it works for you.

Here is the text from that post:

The Solution

After hours of searching and hair pulling action, I came up with an addition to Solution 2 – use iptables to block access to skype. Now, iptables doesn't really have per application rules (like what people are used to from Windows Firewall etc) but it can filter on user/group. Using this, I did the following-

• Install and start squid
• Create a group called nonet
• Use the following iptables rules to block all communication for the group nonet, but still allow access to 127.0.0.1:3128 where squid runs (order is important)-

sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -s 127.0.0.1 –dport 3128 -m owner –gid-owner nonet -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner –gid-owner nonet -j REJECT –reject-with icmp-net-unreachable

• Run Skype as the nonet group like this-

sudo -g nonet PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 /usr/bin/skype

Skype should not be able to login. Goto Options>Advanced and set the HTTPS proxy to point to squid (default 127.0.0.1 port 3128).

Skype should now be able to login using the proxy (it takes a minute or two though). If not, try restarting Skype.

(Note that you don't even need to enable delay queues for squid to control the bandwidth, at least for me Skype doesn't go over 20KBps Upload/Download when using a proxy.)