yum bandwidth throttle not throttling

Latest response

I have recently installed RHEL 6.1. I have modified /etc/yum.conf to throttle the bandwidth that yum utilizes when downloading updates. I am trying to limit yum to 20 kB/s, but it uses up all available bandwidth on our T1. Here is my /etc/yum.conf file:

 

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=3
throttle=20k
exclude=kernel*

 

yum continues to use 160+ kB/s. Am I missing something? Any ideas?

JT
Log in to join the conversation

Responses

JA Red Hat Community Member 89 points
11 October 2011 1:41 PM

I assume this is an rhn repo? If so then one feature of rhnplugin is that it ignores the global "throttle" value (among other config. variables). If you set a throttle for a specific rhn repo. though, that should work.

JT Community Member 37 points
11 October 2011 11:08 PM

Thanks for the tip! I had no idea that rhn-plugin was doing that.

 

rhn_register

Yes, I was using a RHN repo. I had registered using rhn_register, not realizing that registering that way was using the older classic registration system. Nor did I realize that that would cause yum to use rhnplugin, which in turn was ignoring the throttle setting.

 

I tried setting a throttle for a specific rhn repo under this type of registration, but I couldn't find any .repo files containing rhn repos. /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo was empty, and /etc/yum/repos.d/rhel-source.repo contains repos that are disabled. I couldn't find any other .repo files.

 

subscription-manager

Digging further, I learned that registering and subscribing via subscription-manager, in addition to using the new certificate-based registration, causes yum to not use rhnplugin. So now throttling works with the throttle setting in /etc/yum.conf.

 

Thanks for your assistance!

 

P.S. Here is the key piece of information I found (http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/sec-Yum_Plugins.html):

 

Disabling all plugins is not advised because certain plugins provide important Yum services. In particular,rhnplugin provides support for RHN Classic, and product-id and subscription-manager plugins provide support for the certificate-based Content Delivery Network (CDN). Disabling plugins globally is provided as a convenience option, and is generally only recommended when diagnosing a potential problem with Yum.

andriusb's picture Red Hat Guru 3695 points
11 October 2011 11:47 PM

Hi John,

 

We just published the following KBASE to help compare/contrast the two subscription management systems:

 

https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-64463

 

Feel free to provide any comments!

 

Regards,

 

Andrius.

Red Hat, Inc.

rh Red Hat Pro 592 points
20 March 2012 10:13 AM

In case of RHN classic or RHN Satellite server, it is required to specify throttle option in client systems in /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf file for each channel as following:

 

[rhel-x86_64-server-6]
throttle = 20k

[rhel-x86_64-server-optional-6]
throttle = 20k

 

There is feature request filed for this particular issue.