I'm wondering if anyone knows a good way of throttling generic programs that send data over the network. For example, I want to transfer a large amount of data and and it may even run for days, but I can't have it chew up the whole network pipe as this will cause problems for other servers and things that must have enough bandwidth. If I upload a huge amount of data, I don't suddently want all services that use that same pipe to time out.

Ideally I am looking for something like that I can use from the command line to enforce usage restrictions on things that may not have them built into them.

There are programs like netlimiter for windows that can throttle any arbitrary program's network usage both upload and download separately but I don't know of anything similar for linux.


Any recommendations?

I'm using a combination of iptables, l7-filter, and tc to limit file sharing bandwidth.

You should be able to do it with just iptables and tc if you know which port the application is using. l7-filter is nice because it can identify traffic from specific apps. So if you're using port 80 or something you could write a l7-filter protocol for your app.

You can find some good tutorials at:

http://l7-filter.sourceforge.net/

That's my idea anyway.