I have a situation where a server makes lots of requests from big webservers all at the same time. Currently, I have not control over the amount of requests or the rate of the requests from the application that does this. The responses from these webservers is more than the internet line can handle. (Basically, we are launching a DoS on ourselves).

I am going to get push to get this fixed at the application level, but for the time being, is there anyway I can use traffic shaping on the Linux server to control this? I know I can only shape outbound traffic, but maybe there is a way I can slow the TCP responses so the other side will detect congestion and this will help my situation? If there is anything like this with tc, what might the configuration look like?

The idea is that the traffic control might help me control which packets get dropped before they reach my router.