Giving VoIP Traffic the Green Light, Part 3

Wondershaper Status: Clearing the Queue

Last week we left off with using Wondershaper to improve network performance by, somewhat paradoxically, throttling our line speeds to less than their maximum. Today we'll learn how to prioritize specific types of network traffic.

But first, I must make a small but important correction. Unless you are running Debian, before you can run Wondershaper from the command line you must make one edit in the wshaper script. Comment out or delete these lines:

echo Please read the documentation in 'README' first :-)
exit

Now you can run the wshaper command without it complaining. Debian users may run the wondershaper command without making any edits first.

Wondershaper displays its current status with this command:

# wshaper status

Use this command to turn Wondershaper off:

# wshaper clear eth1

It might take a bit of experimenting to find the optimum settings. Typically, around 90 percent of your maximum line speed works well. Start low and work your way up. If your Internet line is used primarily for VoIP, and not a lot of other traffic, this could be all you need to do to ensure decent VoIP performance.