NetClamp docs

Quotas

Quotas are cumulative byte budgets attached to an app. They fire an SSE alert when busted and (optionally) flip a paired rule from ALLOW to RATE_LIMIT to clamp the offender.

Quotas

When to use a quota vs a rule

  • Rule — "Cap Firefox at 500 KB/s, always."

  • Quota — "Spotify gets 2 GB per day; clamp it after that."

Quotas are about total volume over a window. Rules are about instantaneous throughput.

Anatomy of a quota

Name

Free-text. Same role as on rules.

App

Same match-target options as rules (path / file / service / Store app).

Window

hourly / daily / weekly / monthly.

Budget

Bytes (rendered as MB / GB in the picker).

Direction

BOTH / INBOUND / OUTBOUND.

Throttle

Optional. Paired rate-limit applied when the quota is exceeded.

Reset

Manual reset button — zeroes the counter without waiting for the window to roll.

Window roll semantics

  • Hourly — resets on the hour boundary (:00).

  • Daily — resets at local midnight.

  • Weekly — resets Monday 00:00 local time.

  • Monthly — resets on the 1st of the month at 00:00 local.

If the service restarts mid-window, the counter is restored from disk (SQLite-backed) — quotas do NOT reset on reboot.

Throttle siblings

If you set a Throttle on a quota, NetClamp synthesises a sibling RATE_LIMIT rule when the quota is exceeded. The sibling has:

  • Same match target as the quota

  • Action RATE_LIMIT at the throttle rate

  • Priority 90 (one notch higher than default 100)

  • A quota_id tag pointing back to the parent quota

When the window rolls and the quota resets, the sibling is auto-removed.

These siblings don’t count against the credit-based managed-entities cap — they’re plumbing, not user state.

Alerts

Every quota busts an SSE alert at /api/v1/events. The tray binary subscribes and renders a Windows balloon notification:

NetClamp — Spotify exceeded daily quota (2.0 GB).

The notification dedupes for 15 minutes so a chatty app doesn’t spam you. You can mute alerts entirely on the tray flyout.

Visualisation

Each quota row shows a progress bar of used / budget. The bar turns:

  • Green below 50%

  • Yellow 50–90%

  • Red above 90%

Hovering the row shows the reset countdown.