For these reasons partitions should be avoided. Preventing Bandwidth Starvation Bandwidth can be controlled by simple mechanisms such as guarantees and limits. However, priorities provide the most powerful and flexible method to dynamically allocate limited bandwidth. The objective of priorities is to grant preferential privileges to one class of traffic over another. For example, a network manager could grant a higher bandwidth priority for Web traffic than SMTP traffic.
Absolute priorities force network managers to assign a priority level to each class of traffic.
For example, if there are seven priority levels available, Web traffic may be given a priority of 7, and SMTP traffic assigned a priority of 6. When the line is oversubscribed, ALL higher priority traffic gets through before ANY lower priority traffic receives bandwidth. As a result, heavy Web usage may deny bandwidth to all SMTP connections. This situation is defined as bandwidth starvation. Blocking traffic is the job of a firewall, not a bandwidth manager.