[squid-users] [Feature Request] Dynamic bandwidth sharing with priorities in delay pools

[Amos Jeffries]

On 05/08/2026 01:23, Yoan Manuel García Lleó wrote:
> Hello Squid team,
> 
> First of all, thank you for maintaining such a robust and reliable proxy 
> server. We have been using Squid in production for years in a small 
> network with limited bandwidth (4 Mbps, about 15 users).
> 
> Current situation:
> We use delay pools to share bandwidth fairly among users. The "class 1" 
> pool does a decent job of dynamic sharing, but it lacks true QoS 
> features like:

Yes. That is because "delay" is not the same as QoS. It is an older and 
simpler concept from the days of Dial-up Internet, an early precursor to 
what we now call QoS. Traffic is literally just throttled (delayed) 
based on its service ranking (aka "class").


Squid has other configuration settings to integrate with true QoS 
systems. In those, Squid acts as a classifier service marking the HTTP 
traffic for the network QoS policy to act on.

Squid provides several classifiers for modern QoS:

  1) For simple "server type" classification Squid has qos_flows 
directive. Just classifying response packets to the client based on 
upstream cache_peer or server connection type.

  2) For more complex classification with (fast type) ACL selection of 
what to classify each message there are:
  a) request to server/peer classifiers tos_outgoing_mark, 
tos_outgoing_tos, and
  b) reply to client classifiers clientside_mark, and clientside_tos.


FYI, One can switch existing delay pools to true QoS by:
  * implementing the delay_parameters in your network QoS policy, and
  * replacing delay_access with clientside_mark/tos ACL rules.
The delay_class number is equivalent to TOS/MARK value in your QoS system.
That should see modern QoS doing what delay pools currently does for 
you. After that you can adjust the networks QoS policy and Squid ACL 
rules as needed for anything else you want to happen.

HTH
Amos