Do you feel that your network or internet connection is not running smoothly? Often this has to do with programs that eat up the bandwidth too voraciously. The tool NetBalancer helps to detect such wolverines. In addition, you can actively intervene to better distribute the available bandwidth.
Does your download program consume too much bandwidth, so that the internet becomes annoyingly slow? Or are you disturbed by the fact that the lights of your router or switch flicker very loudly and thus betray a lot of network traffic, while you have no idea what is actually going on? Even on a broadband connection, the speed can drop drastically if, for example, you download torrents and play games at the same time. The solution is that you network traffic monitor and at the same time controls how many applications or services go in and out. The name of the NetBalancer app is well chosen, because with this program you better balance the available bandwidth.
Ups and downs
on www.seriousbit.com you will find the free and the paid pro version. Start and follow the setup wizard. During the installation you will be asked to install two drivers. You have to allow that. You can then start NetBalancer via the shortcut on the desktop or via the icon in the system tray. In the main window, on the left, you can see all programs and processes that are currently active in the system.
By clicking on a column title, you sort the data according to this criterion. This way you can see which programs are currently downloading data (down/s) and upload (Up/s). At the same time, you can read the speeds at which this happens. On the right you can read how much these programs have downloaded in the meantime (Downloaded) and uploaded (Uploaded). You also read the number of connections that the program has set up via the internet.
Traffic graph
At the bottom of the graph you get an overview of the total uploads and downloads that your system performs in the Traffic Chart. If you hover over the graph, you can read which applications or services generate a lot of traffic and that way you immediately have a historical overview. To remove that chart from view, click the chart icon in the sidebar. In this bar you will also see a small lightning icon, with this you open Connections. You also get there with Window / Connections. First select a program and open the Connections. You can perform a number of actions with the right mouse button on every connection. For example, you can ping the connection.
Pinging is a kind of test to see if there is indeed a connection with another computer. You can also run a trace command in the same way. With this you follow the path from your computer to the server, along all intermediate steps that it encounters along the way, until the end goal. This way you will find out whether the problem lies with your internet provider, your router or elsewhere in the nodes. And with a bit of luck you can even find out approximately where the problem computer in question is.
WiFi only, Ethernet only
By default, the traffic of all network adapters is mapped, but you can also indicate here that you are only interested in one specific network adapter. At the top, the checkbox is set to All Network Adapters. By clicking on the small black arrow, you follow a specific network adapter. For example, you can choose to monitor only the wireless adapter or only the Ethernet adapter.
Priorities
With NetBalancer you can intervene in the network traffic of certain programs and processes. You can stop them (block), permit (Ignore) and just like in road traffic, it is possible to set right of way rules. In the free version, you control the distribution of bandwidth according to three priorities: High Priority, Normal Priority and Low Priority. In addition, you may enter a maximum of five simultaneous priority changes. If you want to manage the traffic even more finely, you’ll need the paid version, which costs $49.
Right-click on the name of the process or program and then choose Download Priority or Upload Priority the settings: low, normal, high, limit …, block or Ignore. Ignored processes work without any NetBalancer management. Suppose you want to dampen the download enthusiasm of a certain program, then you change the Download Priority in low. You will notice that the priority of the program is also adjusted in the overview of NetBalancer under the column priority. It is also possible to set a specific limit for downloads and uploads, by specifying the maximum KB per second allowed for this connection.
Relative differences
If you assign a low priority to a program, it may still get the full bandwidth because no higher priority program is running. Only when a higher priority program asks for bandwidth or speed, the lower priority program will give priority. So these are relative differences. Through the menu edit , Level Severity determine how big the priority differences are between Low Priority Speed, Normal Priority Speed and High Priority Speed. Moving the slider to the right will increase the differences.
Settings
Be sure to check out the settings. Through edit, Settings you come to some interesting settings. In the tab UI Settings you can customize the unit used to represent network traffic. Do you prefer to read K B or MB, Bytoo or Bit? In the tab traffic you can set that NetBalancer will only apply the precedence rules when a certain bandwidth has been reached. Put a check in Balance network only when and then you give an example 80% of total bandwidth. You can set the period after which the bandwidth should be recalculated with Set bandwidth speed every x minutes. Below in the box Limit all system traffic you can limit the global network traffic, both in terms of downloads and uploads.
Lines
NetBalancer supports rules: a more advanced way to deal with priorities and limits. To do this, click on the red in the left bar R by Rules. In the beginning there is not a single line, but by clicking on the plus sign, you can start such a line.
Even more convenient are the various ready-made templates for rules. So you can effortlessly prioritize traffic to a specific game folder on the hard drive, or set priorities that only apply during the weekdays, while on weekends the reins of network traffic policy can be relaxed. The advantage of rules is that they have a time panel where you can select the hours, day of the week and/or month to set the correct priority for that traffic. For example, it is possible to create two different rules with different settings for different time periods of the day.
