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Specifically, I am looking to rate-limit an scp or sftp session (or other arbitrary network call) in the call itself.

For example, let's say I want to copy 100MB to one server, and 1GB to another. I'd like to be able to run both of these at the same time, but maintain a QoS for "normal" computer usage - somewhat similar to how you can rate-limit bittorrent.

Is there a way to do this without touching the networking hardware?

I'm envisioning something akin to:

magic-qos-tool 'scp file user@host:/path/to/file'

Or..

scp -rate 40kbps file user@host:/path/to/file
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4 Answers 4

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15

Yes, there's an application that works exactly like your 'magic-qos-tool', called "trickle".

EXAMPLES
     trickle -u 10 -d 20 ncftp

     Launch ncftp(1) limiting its upload capacity to 10 KB/s, and download ca-
     pacity at 20 KB/s.
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1
  • 1
    thanks, @davr - one wrapper tool vs learning all the options to each is a great improvement :)
    – warren
    Commented Apr 8, 2010 at 14:51
19

scp has -l, and rsync has --bwlimit.

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4
  • that was not an option in the man page I checked earlier... looks like it depends on the platform, perhaps?
    – warren
    Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 20:52
  • Quite possibly. I have OpenSSH 5.3p1 here.
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 20:55
  • XenServer 6 has scp with -l option
    – Brian Boatright
    Commented May 28, 2012 at 21:06
  • The -l flag in scp doesn't work on Solaris 11. Is there any other option or alternative?
    – Alchemist
    Commented Oct 11, 2016 at 14:57
7

Rsync makes this easy on you, it has an option to do this: --bwlimit=KBPS

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4

sftp has a throttle flag, as of Debian 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 in those distributions:

-l limit

    Limits the used bandwidth, specified in Kbit/s.

(Of course that's a lower case L.)

Source: stfp(1)

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