Is it there a limit-rate downloading application?

[Xan]

Hi to all,

I'm a debian user (mainly desktop user) but I'm not a programmer.

I saw that many (net) application have not the possibility of limiting rate of downloading/uploading. I'm thinking for example about apt-get, the majorty of webbrowers (even console browsers), and some more. And this feature is much times requested (see for example apt-get requests of that feature).

Well, come to the point, I think that it were useful if there is a program that only limits the rate of downloading/uploading (in general, traffic over net).

If this program exists, we could do for example (say it lrr (limit-rate-restricter)):

lrr "apt-get dist-upgrade" --rate=10k

or

lrr "mozilla" --rate=10k

With this, we assure that apt-get and mozilla only use 10k of traffic.


Mainly, this program could be insteresting for people who can't install QoS in their computer.

Do you know if there is something related? If not, anyone want to write them?

Thanks,
Xan.

[lacek]

You may want to take a look at trickle. It behaves exactly as you described. It is a user-space tool, meaning you don't need any kernel stuff for it to work.
It has a daemon, which shapes traffic for several processes (this way, you can alter the overall bandwidth), but it works without a running daemon (so you can alter bandwidth limits one by one).

I tried it with some apps, Konqueror didn't like it at all, Mozilla, wget and apt-get was running smoothly.